The Rev. Stephanie Salinas was directing movers and trying to unpack boxes at her new Bangor home. Just when the newly ordained minister thought she was making headway, the doorbell would ring and there would be a few more boys gathered on her front steps.

They’d shuffle their feet, look at their shoes and elbow each other until one would finally shyly ask, “Do you have any boys here?” So the new pastor of the 173-year-old First Baptist Church of Bangor would stop what she was doing, introduce the boys to her 12- and 6-year-old sons, instruct them to stay close by but out of the movers’ way, and go back to her tasks.

The furniture that was supposed to go to her husband’s third-floor office wouldn’t fit up the attic stairs, and as the temperature reached 90, he wondered aloud what had happened to the cool, dry summers in Maine they’d heard so much about.

But Salinas, 40, was just glad she was able to have written the first sermon she would deliver as pastor in five short days before she left New Jersey, her home state.

Appropriately, she titled the sermon “Now What?”

Amid all the interruptions, a new pastor faces myriad choices: setting priorities (children, teens, seniors), visiting people (powerful members, backsliders, the homebound), crafting sermons (too long? too short?), making friends (other clergy, nonmembers), healing wounds (among members, in the choir, in the neighborhood), and allocating energy (night meetings, time with family). The list goes on and on.

And every congregation has its distinctive “personality” for a new pastor to contend with as well.

Salinas compared a good match between a pastor and a congregation to a good marriage or finding the right partner in life.

“This was clearly the match,” she said. “There wasn’t a feeling [with other congregations] like there was with this one,” she said. “There was a clear feeling that God was calling us to this place, even though my husband’s initial reaction was, ‘No. It’s too cold.'”

The minister said that she and the congregation had similar outlooks on how to minister to the community and a commitment to outreach and being inclusive. She said that First Baptist, like many mainline churches, needs to attract more young families like her own without abandoning its rich traditions and heritage.

Salinas’ life has been a whirlwind of activity since May. She graduated from seminary, got her first job as a minister, bought a house in Bangor, sold a house in Enfield, N.J., and moved farther from her roots than she’s ever lived before.

Somewhere in all the hubbub, she was ordained by a congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches in the USA, one of the nation’s major Baptist denominations.

As Salinas stepped up to the pulpit of the church on Center Street the first Sunday of August, verses from the prophet Jeremiah seemed right for the occasion: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

“This is my favorite Scripture,” Salinas said. “It talks about the future and hope. And it is comforting to know that our future is in God’s hands. Yet, it is harder to live, perhaps, when we don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Although my friends from New Jersey have suggested it,” joked Salinas, “I don’t feel that we’ve been exiled. Although, many of us feel exiled in our daily lives. … But God has given us a future of hope and given us Jesus Christ as a sign of that future and that hope,” she told her congregation.

As Salinas ender her sermon, she challenged her congregation to “reach out to the people in our lives who don’t know the Gospel and just drive us crazy. … For we are told that when we go to these people and share the love of God, we feel God’s love more.”

People who have not met Salinas might find that a contradictory statement, considering her former profession. She worked in banking for 15 years before enrolling in the New Brunswick (N.J.) Theological Seminary in 1999.

In an interview, she said that she had felt pulled to the ministry while an undergraduate in the early 1980s.

Raised a Presbyterian, Salinas “made some real faith decisions” while working at an American Baptist summer camp. That’s also where she met Ned, who is now her husband and who works for a legal publishing firm.

“In the summer of 1998, I was working as a volunteer counselor at camp, and I felt a very clear call to the ministry,” she said. “It was almost like I could audibly hear God’s voice. I heard it two more times over the next couple of months, but said, ‘Now is not the right time, call back.”‘

After talking with Ned, whose father is a Baptist minister, Salinas decided that there was no “right time” to answer God’s call and enrolled in the seminary.

While Salinas pursued her theological studies, the Rev. Frank E. Girdwood announced his retirement in 2000 from Bangor’s First Baptist Church, which has been a downtown fixture almost as long as Bangor has been a community.

The stone church at the intersection of Center and Park streets was completed in 1913 to replace the original church, destroyed in Bangor’s Great Fire of 1911. It was moved from the bottom of Park Street hill, where Bangor City Hall is now located, to its current site.

After hiring a part-time interim minister, the church began the search process.

If the church’s search committee had been told a year ago the next pastor would be a woman, most of its members would have said, “Not a chance,” said Steven Douglas of Bangor. He numbered himself among those and was a bit surprised that about half of the applicants, found through the American Baptist Churches’ national database, were female.

In the final analysis, however, it was Salinas’ personality, not her gender, that made her the first woman pastor of the church, Douglas said.

“It was her energy and enthusiasm,” he said. “It was totally contagious. We interviewed her for about 31/2 hours and were as energized at the end of it as we were at the beginning. There was no question in any of our minds that God led us to that decision.”

Another search committee member, Clyde Folsom, said the group looked at about 90 candidates.

“There’s good chemistry there, and that’s very important” Folsom, 67, who has attended the church since 1965. “She is an excellent preacher, very knowledgeable, and has good people skills.

“When we started, we wanted the best person for the job, but most of us thought in terms of a male because that’s what we’re used to. But every turn in the road, led us to a woman – this woman.”

Services at First Baptist Church, 56 Center St., are at 9 a.m. through the summer. For more information, call 945-9694.

Pastor: The Rev. Stephanie Salinas.

Church: First Baptist, Bangor.

Age: 40.

Spouse: Ned Salinas, 43.

Children: Two sons, 6 and 12.

Hometown: Edison, N.J.

Education: Bachelor?s degree, Susquehanna (Pa.) University, 1984. Master of divinity, New Brunswick (N.J.) Theological Seminary, 2002.

Previous career: Banking and

publishing.