Six Years on the Cape, and a Family Transformed

Joe Greemore didn't know much about Cape Cod when he first heard there might be a pastoral position at Brewster Baptist Church. His initial reaction was skepticism. He was happy where he was — lead pastor of a small church in Iowa, perfectly settled in the Midwest. The Cape wasn't on his radar.

The path that brought him here started, of all places, in Florida — at a gathering of American Baptist pastors called the Colloquium. The Colloquium is a group of pastors who meet to encourage one another, share learnings, worship together, and renew themselves after the busyness of Christmas. It was there that Joe met Pastor Doug Scalise, who told him about Brewster Baptist Church. Joe had no idea at the time that he'd be working there a few years later.

When word came through denominational channels that the church was looking for a Pastor of Worship, Joe was happy leading his church of about 150 people. And the move would mean a change in role — from head of staff to associate pastor — as well as a jump to a much larger congregation of 300-plus worshipers and a membership of 600. But something about it stayed with him. Then his wife Shelby went to check it out.

She came in August of 2019, discreetly. She didn't announce herself. She arrived as a friend of Doug and his wife Jill, looked around, took it in, and flew home. Before she'd even landed back in Iowa, she was already making the case: We have to move there.

That was the turning point. Joe put his name in the hat, went through the interview process — which works a little differently in the Baptist denomination and lasted several months — visited the Cape himself in November of 2019, and by December had been offered the position.

The plan was to finish the school year and head east in the summer.

Then March happened.

The pandemic paused everything — the move, the housing market, the question of whether the church should even proceed with a new hire. Joe and Shelby prayed through it. Their house sold the day before it hit the market. The delay ended up being just one month. The Greemore family — Joe, Shelby, and their children, Corbany, Addyson, and Greyson — arrived in Brewster in July of 2020, and Joe officially began serving Brewster Baptist in August of that year.

Their introduction to Cape Cod life: three weeks of quarantine inside a house, reading books and playing games, watching movies, quality time with family, listening to music, waiting...

When September came and the summer traffic thinned, they finally got to explore the place they'd uprooted their lives to reach. The church had already purchased a home for them on Millstone Road — recognizing that a housing market on Cape Cod bears no resemblance to one in the Midwest — and a crew of roughly 60 volunteers from Brewster Baptist spent 90 days completely renovating it top to bottom. It became the church's second parsonage, and the Greemore family's home on the Cape.

"A lot had to happen for us to come to work here and live here," Joe says. "And it all fell into place perfectly."

Joe's title at Brewster Baptist was Pastor of Worship, and music was at the center of what he came to do. It's a role that fits him at a deep level — his love of music in worship was planted early, and it has shaped his ministry ever since. He came to the position with a broad musical background, having led worship not just locally but at national and international levels throughout his career.

His goal at Brewster wasn't simply to lead Sunday services. He wanted to raise the profile of the music program — in quality, in style, in reach. He also wanted to preach, to be present in the community, and to build partnerships that would create a genuine lane of exchange between the church and the wider world — not a wall, but an avenue for conversation. That meant working with the musicians already at the church, finding others in the broader community who hadn't yet been discovered, and connecting with musicians around the region and around the world who might want to partner in raising the profile of worship music at Brewster Baptist.

The church runs two distinct Sunday services, each with its own musical personality — traditional hymns at one, contemporary worship music at the other — and Joe worked across both, helping to shape a program that could speak to the full breadth of the staff and congregation's preferences, experience, expectation, and sense of style.

One highlight of that work came during the church's bicentennial celebration in 2024, when Joe helped bring a very personal partnership to life. His old friend Jeff Kready — a Broadway tenor who has performed as guest soloist with the Cleveland Pops, the Colorado Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Philadelphia Pops, and many others — came to Brewster Baptist to perform. The connection between Joe and Jeff goes back decades: the two were in youth choir and bell choir together at First Baptist Church in Topeka in the late 1990s, growing up making music in the same pews, in the same youth group. When Joe had the chance to mark the church's 200th year with something special, he knew exactly whom to call. Jeff came, he performed, and the evening became one of the truly memorable musical moments of the bicentennial year — a reminder of what's possible when deep friendship and serious artistry come together in a place of worship. Joe and Shelby later caught Jeff on Broadway in New York, starring in Operation Mincemeat, based on a real British WWII intelligence operation. It was that kind of friendship — one that keeps showing up, in church and on stage, across decades.

Six years on, Joe is candid about what got accomplished and what remains in progress. Partnerships were built. New musicians came in. The quality and profile of the program grew. But some of the work — settling on a clear identity, figuring out what style resonates most deeply with the congregation and the wider community — is unfinished, and he knows it. "I'd like to think I had a significant part in advancing the importance of that work," he says. "Beyond the time that I'm gone, I think that work will continue." The next chapter picks up where this one leaves off.

For many in the congregation, the music has become one of the true high points of the service. There's a moment each Sunday when the congregation greets its neighbors — handshakes, a word or two, the small ritual of turning toward the people around you. I'll admit I've developed my own version of that ritual. When that moment comes, I head straight for the musicians. A handshake, a fist bump, a quick word of thanks. It's a small gesture, but it feels like the right one. What they give to that service every week deserves to be acknowledged, and that moment is my way of doing it.

Neither Joe nor Shelby had ever set foot on Cape Cod before Shelby's scouting trip. Joe had some East Coast experience — he'd visited Washington, D.C., with his college group around 2002 to see the monuments and the War Memorials, and he had an aunt who lived in Fairfax, Virginia. He joined the Army Reserves in 2005, did nine weeks of basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina and sixteen weeks of advanced individual training at Fort Eustis, Virginia — near Newport News and Norfolk — and paid his aunt a visit during that stretch. But New England was new territory entirely.

Growing up in the Midwest, Joe had always imagined Maine as a place of rolling sheep farms and pastoral quiet — shepherds walking the pastures, successful sheep-shearing operations in the hills of New Hampshire, a very pastoral landscape. He knew the picture wasn't quite accurate. But he'd always wanted to visit. Since moving to the Cape, he's actually done it: hiking in the White Mountains, exploring the Adirondacks, making it up to Blue Hill, Bar Harbor, Acadia, and Cadillac Mountain. The dream and the reality turned out to be compatible. In fact, a good friend from his Cedar Valley years in Iowa — Reverend Tim Ensworth, a UCC pastor — retired to Blue Hill, and Joe visited him there. "He's sort of living my best life," Joe says, laughing.

What he hadn't expected was how much the Cape itself would become the backdrop for nearly everything that mattered over the next six years.

His oldest daughter Corbany arrived as a middle schooler in the strangest possible school year. The Nauset School District — named for the local Wampanoag tribe — ran a 2-2-1 schedule that first year: two days in person for Group A, two days for Group B alternating, and everyone online on Wednesdays. Masks all day long. It was a hard way to enter middle school, to get to know teachers, to build friendships. Corbany had been on the introverted side. The conditions weren't exactly designed to bring someone out of her shell.

But somewhere in those six years, something shifted. This spring, at an awards ceremony, Corbany was recognized for volunteering hundreds of hours during her high school years — more than double the students who stood up before her. She received recognition from both the school and the state of Massachusetts for her quiet leadership and actively engaged, serving style. A lot of those hours were at the church. She leaves for college this fall, with the family settling nearby.

Addyson found sign language — not every school district offers it as a secondary language, but Nauset does, and she loved it. Greyson got into Model UN. The Nauset schools, Joe says, have a reputation as a pipeline to the Ivy League — not what the Greemores were necessarily after, but an indicator of the kind of academic rigor and environment the kids got to inhabit for six years.

Shelby built something of her own, too.

She worked for the church for a year as the special events and activities coordinator — and in that role developed a hospitality ministry that brought snacks to schools in Brewster, Eastham, and Orleans during teacher appreciation periods. She kept it going long after her staff relationship with the church ended, simply because it felt like the right thing to do. She's an educator herself — she knew what that kind of recognition means to a teacher who feels unseen. As Joe puts it, she put herself in their shoes. It opened new doors and avenues of contact to the church.

She later became a long-term sub at Stony Brook Elementary, the lower elementary school in Brewster — kindergarten through second grade. Teaching kindergarten wasn't something she'd originally been drawn to; she was more comfortable with older grades, more familiar with the curriculum expectations. But after spending a full school year doing long-term substitute teaching positions across two kindergarten classrooms with a great team of teachers, one semester each, she came home with a completely different outlook. "I loved that experience. I would happily teach kindergarten," she told Joe.

This past year she taught PE, then became a reading interventionist, and then a building sub — available at a moment's notice to fill any role, from PE to classroom teacher to aide. Teachers and community members began asking if she might be planning to take an open position. And then the school did what schools in Massachusetts almost never do: they offered her a full teaching position.

She finished her master's degree just in time to qualify for it.

She's turning it down — to keep the family together, to be closer to Joe and Shelby's families, and to see what God has in store for her next, as the family plans to move to Kansas this summer.

Joe has thought carefully about how he wants to show up at the new church — a small congregation that's been hit hard by the post-pandemic attendance drop. Across denominations, churches saw 30 to 50 percent drops in attendance during the pandemic, and many of those people simply never came back. The definition of "regular attendance" has quietly shifted — from three or four Sundays a month to, in many cases, one.

His goal isn't to arrive with every answer or solution, but to come alongside the church and community, listen, share vision, plan, and get to work building together. He's described what he wants to do as servant leadership — modeled, as he sees it, on Jesus himself, who came "not to be served but to serve" (Matthew 20:28). He doesn't want to be the pastor who has everyone else execute his plan. He wants to come alongside, to listen, to synthesize, to build relationships in the community. In seminary, earning his master of divinity, he learned to think of his calling not as being the pastor of a particular church, but as being the pastor to the local community — present to the businesses, the neighbors, the people who may never walk through the doors.

He makes me think of a pastor I once knew — someone whose church grew more than any other I'd been connected to — who measured impact not by attendance but by the number of people served. He had no growth goal. He didn't care about growth. He believed it was Jesus's job to grow the church if that's what Jesus wanted; his job was to serve the community as generously as possible. Homeless people showed up on Sunday mornings because they knew snacks were out. Some of the older members objected. The pastor's answer was essentially: sorry, that's who we are. People were drawn to it.

Joe heard something similar in his interview at the new church. During the process, someone asked him about the food pantry — the church has been pouring resources into it, but wondering if that was a reciprocal relationship. Was it worth continuing? Joe's answer: that's not the right question. We don't know the difference we're making. We're not doing it to benefit the church. We're doing it because people need food.

The pantry continues.

The kids are not all thrilled about leaving. The two younger ones — both heading into high school — are losing friends, losing a community, losing a place they've known for the better part of their lives. Joe doesn't minimize it. He says plainly that the younger a child, the harder the move — the longer the runway ahead of them for the friendships they're now leaving behind. An eighth grader going into ninth grade can't easily see the appeal of moving to northeast Kansas when everything is familiar and loved on Cape Cod.

Joe and Shelby approached the decision like a geographic equation. They drew a triangle on a map of Kansas — Manhattan, where Corbany will go to college; Wichita, El Dorado, and Topeka, where family is. Somewhere within a circle around that triangle was where they needed to be. They landed close to the Blue Valley school district, the top-ranked district in Kansas and in the top one percent nationally. A lateral move academically, Joe believes, even if the kids can't yet see it through the lens of everything they've come to love here in New England.

Corbany, the oldest daughter, is taking the news the best because she sees it as a big win. She has the least to lose and, arguably, everything to gain. The family is moving near her, not away from her — within a couple of hours' drive, close enough to be a safety net, far enough that she'll have her freedom. She won't have a car on campus the first year. Two hours might as well be another state. Joe and Shelby are at peace with that.

One of the things Joe wanted most out of the Cape years was simply more time with Shelby — to travel, to explore, to be sweethearts somewhere new. They managed it. They traveled to Hungary to visit missionary friends and build partnerships. Shelby traveled to Israel. This past April, while their kids went on a mission trip to Camp Judson in North Springfield, Pennsylvania, Joe and Shelby slipped away to New York City for a few nights. They saw Hamilton on Broadway. They saw Jeff Kready — the same friend who had performed at Brewster's bicentennial — starring on Broadway. They took the ferry to Liberty Island and walked Ellis Island — that old front door of the nation, where Jewish, German, Irish, Italian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and many more families came and built their community bonds before pursuing their next chapter. They visited the National Museum of the American Indian and the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side (fascinating). They shared a meal at Shinjuku Ramen, which they highly recommend. Joe spent time in Japan in 2004 and has wanted to take Shelby ever since. He thinks the ramen dinner moved the needle.

Before the move in June, Joe and Shelby are hoping to finally make it to Nantucket. Neither of them has been. Their kids have — through school track meets and various activities — but the parents have not. Six years on Cape Cod, and there are still islands left to see.

When Joe thinks about what six years on the Cape has given him, he keeps coming back to the people. He's someone who loves to encounter and hear the stories of remarkable lives — in Denver, he knew a minister named Bill Mankin who, before his career as a regional minister, had been an infrared spectroscopist whose work helped diagnose the integrity of our ozone layer. In Iowa, he knew David Green, a former Marine who had been one of the group of men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Here on the Cape, he met a retired lieutenant colonel who'd served as head of logistics for Target and continues using his logistics skills to meet needs and feed hungry children around the world. Each conversation, each friendship, each story — another thread in a beautiful tapestry shaped by extraordinary people.

At Brewster Baptist, that spirit shows up every November in the holiday fair — where every dollar raised goes back out to local nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity Cape Cod and the Family Table Collaborative. People bring attic treasures and homemade baked goods. The proceeds don't stay in the building. They go into the community. Joe can't say enough great things about that outward focus.

"I'm grateful," he says, "for the many ways that imagination is allowed to become reality here. You imagine an idea — what might it look like, what might it sound like — and then the work gets done to make it happen with the most wonderful people."

Lead Pastor Doug Scalise offered his own send-off: "I'm grateful to Joe, Shelby, Corbany, Addyson, and Greyson for stepping out in faith and coming to Cape Cod to be part of Brewster Baptist Church in 2020. All five of them have contributed to our church and the larger community by sharing themselves and their gifts and talents. As they return to Kansas they go with our prayers and gratitude as well as our confidence that the church, schools, and community they will enter will be blessed."

The Greemores aren't sure when the family will be back on Cape. His kids, he says, will probably make sure it's soon.