A Well-Traveled Pastor Puts Life's Lessons to Work in East Hampton Congregation

The Rev. Walter Silva Thompson Jr.’s arrival at Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton marks a new chapter for the 61-year-old church, whose pastors until now had always been “bi-vocational.”

“Part of the prerequisite for my coming to help them was that they understand the importance of and need for a full-time pastor,” he said in his office late last month.

A pastor for 25 years, it was hard for him to see the job as a part-time one, but he said it took time for leaders of the church, where he was officially installed in April, to come around to his way of thinking.

“It is and was a struggle for this church,” he said, but he “walked with them through it,” serving in the post on an interim basis from December until all the details of the position could be worked out a few months later.

The parsonage next to the church is in the midst of renovations, and soon Mr. Thompson will be able to move in rather than commuting from outside Freeport. That’s a good thing, because he expects to be busy in his new post. “My goal is to be here as often and as much as possible,” he said.

“I plan to retire here. I knew that wherever I was going next, I didn’t want to go to a big church. I wanted to go somewhere I could make a difference, where I could love the people and be loved by the people and make a difference in the community.”

In addition to Sunday worship at 11 a.m. and Wednesday prayer and Bible study at 7 p.m., he will be in the office three to four times a week seeing people who need counseling. He will visit members of the congregation in the hospital, at home, even in prison, should the need arise, and generally “make myself available to the Calvary family,” which he is still getting to know. “My door is always open,” and through that, he added, “relationships are built.”

The differences between his new church and his former one, Morning Star Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens — where he served for nine years — are many. In Queens he had a congregation of 800; in East Hampton “the congregation is maybe 150.” And despite the fact that Jamaica, Queens, is, as he said, “considered the most diverse community in the United States,” his congregations there and in previous posts had been predominantly African-American. In East Hampton, he said, he finds himself in a more multicultural church, with people from Ecuador, China, Germany, and the Caribbean, among other places, sharing the pews with African-American families who have been here for generations.

Mr. Silva has preached, studied, and lectured far and wide — in Argentina, Scotland, Jamaica, and Switzerland, as well as in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. His mentor in graduate school at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania was the Rev. Dr. J. Deotis Roberts, a pioneer in black theology who had earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “One of his methods for teaching was to travel,” Mr. Thompson said.

He and a fellow student traveled extensively with him on a sabbatical year. With his mentor, he studied Latin American and African liberation theology — a once-controversial movement that calls for the church to take a strong role in social justice issues and advocating for the poor. They visited the Buenos Aires School of Theology, the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, the University of Edinburgh, and the Ecumenical Institute at Chateau de Bossey in Switzerland.

“He always taught us the importance of immersing ourselves in the culture, of being able to dialogue and intermingle with the common people,” Mr. Thompson said.

In East Hampton, he said, “I’ve had to be intentional in my presentation of the gospel on Sunday morning because of those various cultures within this congregation. . . . Those experiences of travel and learning prepared me for this moment.”

Mr. Thompson grew up in Houston. Seeing many young men and women in his community becoming involved with drugs, he started working with the Christian outreach program Teen Challenge as a Bible instructor. Eventually he was transferred to Philadelphia, where he “felt the call to go into full-time ministering.” After graduating with a degree in sociology from Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa., he earned a master’s in divinity from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. His first job as pastor was at St. Joseph Baptist Church in Philadelphia.

Although he had been accepted to do doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, he instead took a job as pastor at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Springfield, Mass., where he met his future wife. Linda Silva Thompson is now the dean of the Monroe College School of Business and Accounting in the Bronx. “She grew up on the Cape,” he said, so this part of Long Island, which is similar in many ways, feels a little like home already. Their teenage children, Maya and Ethan, are in boarding school.

He was at Mount Calvary for seven years and then at Calvary Baptist Church in Pittsburgh for two before taking the position in Queens. There, he didn’t just lead the church, he became a community leader and activist as a founding member of Empowered Queens United in Action and Leadership (EQUAL). “We sought to address the issues of lack of health care, lack of adequate schools in the community, lack of housing, and also to sit with community leaders, the city council, government officials on how we could address these issues.”

The group put pressure on authorities, landlords, and the powers that be to fix some of the problems, but also provided funding to help with things as simple as paying a delinquent electric bill and as multifaceted as establishing new charter schools. “We were kind of the vanguards, the individuals people called on to get things done. We provided funding — each church was responsible for a certain amount of money and we also got federal funding.”

“That’s my concept of full-time pastoring,” Mr. Thompson said. On any given Sunday, “I’m counselor, lawyer, doctor, economist, politician, civic leader — all of those things in my presentation.”

“What I see happening in East Hampton is there is this migration of different cultures into this community. . . . I’m having to deal with people coming here, especially from the Caribbean and other places — they’re living in homes with two or three families. It’s a challenge for them, it’s a challenge for the church, and it’s a challenge for this municipality. What impact does that have on the community and what role does the church play? I see my role as a pastor to work with those communities as well as the police department, the mayor, civic groups, and organizations to look at how do we live together as a community and create some kind of unity and peace and justice.”

He hopes to make the church more family-friendly by establishing a nursery with some religious instruction during services and by getting young people more involved. “How can the church become relevant in the life of our young people who are going to make a contribution in their homes and their community?” he asked.

With so much in the news over the past year to discourage young people of color, “we have to continue to instill hope that right is still stronger than wrong, that there are good policemen, that there is hope in the midst of hopelessness.”