Farewell to Pastor Dave: The Beloved Methodist Minister Is Leaving the Avalon Pulpit After 12 Years
Pastor Dave Easter 2024
Rev. David Montanye reflects on the many roads that led him to leadership of the First United Methodist Church of Avalon as he prepares to retire in early June.
Little did the minister, better known as Pastor Dave, realize that delivering basic necessities to neighbors in need, which he did for his grandmother as a boy in Stony Point, N.Y., might lead to a higher calling.
“My grandmother was a Methodist and the ‘benevolence treasurer’ in her church,” he says.
A benevolence treasurer applied church funds to assist church members, or others in the surrounding community, who struggled with poverty.
Those seeds of benevolence planted in the future clergyman found fertile soil.
As a 17-year-old, Montanye served as student coordinator for a major fundraising event, the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation’s “International Walk for Development” in Rockland County, N.Y. His philanthropic efforts on behalf of impoverished people around the globe paid off.
“In 1970, we had 2,500 marchers and raised $25,000,” he says quietly. “In 1971, we had 5,000 marchers and raised $55,000.”
When the time came to choose a career path, he was not sure whether he wanted to be a lawyer or a minister. So, he sampled each by studying for one year in law school and another year in seminary. The scholarly gentleman decided to render his life to God, though that year in law school came in handy down the road.
“In your first year of law school, you learn a new language,” he notes. “An embryonic legal background was always pretty helpful” in dealing with situations that would arise in his ministry.
As Montanye sits in his office surrounded by diplomas, awards and other personal memorabilia, items that tell bits and pieces of the story of his ministry, the clergyman reflects on God’s ways in leading us. “God has a sense of humor!” he quips.
Pastor Dave earned his master of divinity degree at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J., in 1979 and spent the next 10 years working as a local pastor in various capacities. His first stop was Haverstraw (N.Y.) United Methodist Ministries, Inc. There, he served six years as mission coordinator of the collaborative community development program.
“We started out with a closed-up, empty building” in a neighborhood that had seen some changes, he recalls. Working with a $9,000 budget, the minister found ways to help more than 400 young people in need of positive influences via after-school programs in the arts and sciences, and summer employment.
“We opened an arts center,” he adds. “We also received a grant for a program to assist children of alcoholics,” the first program of its kind in New York state. Plus, with financial support from Rockland County, the group further resuscitated the building by opening a senior citizen center, complete with a senior lunch program.
Not only that, the former United Methodist Fellowship of Haverstraw was resurrected on Easter Sunday and named La Resurreccion United Methodist Church to suit the local Hispanic community in 1985. “We chartered it as a mission congregation,” Montanye explains.
He spent the next few years serving local churches in Garnerville, N.Y., and Branchville, N.J. “Your first church teaches you how to be a pastor,” the minister notes. “A small church really teaches you” beyond all the lessons learned in the seminary, he adds.
During the next decade, Pastor Dave traveled the world fundraising and managing communications for the United Methodist Committee on Relief, a global humanitarian aid and development organization that offers relief, rehabilitation, resettlement, and renewal to people in countries worldwide. While working for UMCOR, Montanye served 80 countries and visited sites in Senegal, Liberia and Ghana, Brazil, Mexico, Austria, Russia, and Ukraine.
In a communications role with a new twist, he worked as associate executive producer of a video created to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Methodist Committee on Relief in 1990. “Love in Action” won awards at film festivals. It was also eligible to be an Oscar nominee as a short documentary. Much to his amusement, the clergyman has the framed letter from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on his office wall to prove it.
When Montanye’s wife Susan Trumbetta continued her studies at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s, the couple moved to Charlottesville, Va.
There, he directed the Refugee Resettlement Program of the Virginia Council of Churches, serving more than 250 refugees per year. At the time, most of the people the resettlement program served were Vietnamese refugees or Soviet Pentecostal Christians from Russia. Refugees were taught English and provided with employment opportunities. Many Soviet Pentecostals were helped in setting up small businesses. Most Vietnamese refugees were served via family unification with relatives already here in the states.
“One of the refugees named their first child David,” notes Montanye’s wife.
Pastor Dave went from refugee resettlement to fundraising for higher education during another 10 years of his ministry. He worked as a development director for the University of Louisville’s Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, Pace University School of Law in White Plains, N.Y., and Keuka College in the Finger Lakes region of New York. He also coordinated the 125th Anniversary Capital Campaign for Bacone College in Muskogee, Okla.
The pastor and his wife made Poughkeepsie, N.Y., their home when she began her work there as a professor of psychology at Vassar College and he worked at Pace University.
Pastor Dave reminisces about highlights from his days at the University of Louisville.
With help from one of the school’s law professors, he set up an immigrant law clinic there to help newcomers navigate their way to U.S. citizenship.
Furthermore, Louisville is the hometown of the late Muhammad Ali, forever dubbed “The Greatest.” Montanye wrote the funding proposal for what is now the University of Louisville’s Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice, and was delighted to meet Ali.
After assuming so many different roles in living his vocation, Pastor Dave wanted to return to his roots, “the ministry of the local church” for the last years of his ministry. So, the First United Methodist Church’s leadership recommended a position for him in Avalon. Having enjoyed a visit to Avalon as a child, Trumbetta encouraged her husband to give it a try.
When the minister began his time in Avalon on July 1, 2012, he was a bit surprised during his first service. “Up north, the church is often empty on summer Sundays. Everyone is on vacation,” he says. “There were 120 people my first Sunday!”
Several parishioners shared thoughts on his ministry in Avalon.
“Pastor Dave had challenges during his time with our church,” says Lay Leader Lynn Schwartz. “He got us through COVID” by setting up services on Facebook. On a more personal level, after Schwartz’s father Bill Tozour Jr. died in April of 2020, she says Montanye sat in his car near the grave and directed her in conducting her dad’s funeral service with a handful of people in attendance due to COVID restrictions. “It was tough,” she adds.
Along with his commitment to his congregation and the missions, Pastor Dave was a vital presence in the Seven Mile Beach community, Schwartz notes. With his congregation’s support, the minister was “ecumenical” in working with the Catholic Church in Avalon on projects, charitable in assisting the Glenwood Avenue Elementary School in Wildwood with reading incentives and donations of school supplies and backpacks, and supportive of the former women’s Avalon Civic Club. He also volunteered to be the chaplain for the Avalon Volunteer Fire Department and led the History Book Club at the Avalon Free Public Library.
Parishioner Martha Richardson notes the ease of talking with Montanye. “I could speak frankly with Pastor Dave, even though we didn’t always agree,” she says.
Beverly Coleman, the church’s Staff-Parish Relations chair, describes him as “very optimistic and very steadfast in the things he tries to do.” After some thought, she adds, “He is sincerely kind with people of all kinds and incomes” and recalls meals together at Family Promise of Cape May County, a shelter committed to keeping homeless families together.
Pastor Dave will soon pack up his diplomas, awards, and other personal memorabilia that add warmth to his office, say his farewells, and head back to Poughkeepsie with his spouse.
His successor, Rev. Juliann Henry, will soon cease being the manager for pastoral care at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center and assume pastorship of the First United Methodist Church of Avalon. If history repeats itself, Rev. Henry will be warmly welcomed.
“Avalon’s been good to me. It’s a healthy place and it’s a healing place,” Pastor Dave muses. “Parishioner Tom Cope once said, ‘The First United Methodist Church of Avalon’s congregation falls in love with its pastor.’ That’s pretty reciprocal. I’ve fallen in love with them.”
