Setauket Presbyterian Church on Sunday welcomed a new assistant pastor, with religious leaders from around the Presbytery of Long Island coming together for her ordinance.
Kate Jones Calone, who was previously serving the congregation as a pastorial assistant for the past year and leads the youth program and adult education, formally became Rev. Kate Jones Calone. She called it "a real privilege" to be able to be ordained into the Presbyterian ministry.
"It's something that I feel very humbled about," she said, "and so grateful that there are so many people who have supported me along the way, ... and very grateful that God has led me here."
Calone steps into the assistant pastor role most recently held by , who was called to serve the Presbyterian Church of White Plains in 2011. She described SPC as a great congregation with many very dedicated members.
"It's a congregation that's very focused on mission and dedicates an incredible amount of its time and resources to helping people in the community and the world, so it's a very outward-looking congregtion, which I think is wonderful," she said. "It's a vibrant place...a joyful place to be."
A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Calone said she spent six years as an attorney before entering the Princeton seminary. She previously worked at First Presbyterian Church in Northport before coming to Setauket Presbyterian. She lives in Babylon with husband Dave and children Sara, 6, Peter, 5, and Meg, 1.
While she was in law school and a practicing attorney, Calone – whose father, Rev. Dana C. Jones Jr., is a member of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh – said she came to realize that many of her beliefs were motivated by her faith.
"The church always felt very much like home to me," she said. "At some point it just became important to me to really express more explicitly these things that I care about and these things in my life are really driven by my beliefs."
SPC's pastor, Rev. John Kloepfer, said Calone has "such tremendous gifts."
"She has incredible credentials for it. She's very bright and sensitive, very open spirit," he said. "Whatever church she's in will be blessed. This church is very fortunate to have her."
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