Paul Tunkle grew up Jewish in the Bronx. Now he has a home and 38 acres of Dresden woodlands, and on Sunday, Feb. 1, the Episcopal Bishop of Maine will install him as priest of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Wiscasset.

“I feel like I’ve gone to heaven, and it’s surprisingly cold,” Tunkle, 64, said at his desk Monday inside the Hodge Street church.

He’s been serving as St. Philip’s priest since last fall when he and the church reached a contract for the part-time post. Sunday’s installment with Bishop Stephen Lane makes Tunkle’s role official.

But it’s more than that, Tunkle said. The ceremony not only recognizes him as the priest but also acknowledges the start of the church’s next journey. The church has a dedicated core group and helps the community with food donations and a thrift shop, but membership is in decline, he said. Members will need to work together to pursue the church’s future, he said.

“I would like to strengthen them and encourage them in their efforts to kind of reinvent themselves on some level,” Tunkle said. If that means the church grows into one that needs more of a minister’s time than he could provide, then he would consider his time there a success, he said.

When Tunkle first visited the church, the semi-retired priest wasn’t looking for work, just a place to attend services. He had retired from a large church in Baltimore.

“It was a big congregation, with a big staff, everything that this place was not.

“Something about this little church just kind of spoke to me. It just kind of moves my heart.”

In Tunkle, St. Philip’s has an experienced priest whose sermons are easily understood, and someone who is easy to talk with, said John Young, senior warden of the church’s vestry.

Since minister Ann Lovejoy-Johnson left Maine about seven years ago, the church has had interns, an interim priest and “supply” priests who would give sermons, Young said.

Tunkle and wife Judy Tunkle moved to Maine as back–to-the-landers in the early 1970s. Attending church, he became drawn to it and was baptized in 1974. Ten years later, the same bishop who had baptized him, ordained him. There were no openings in Maine, so the University of Maine at Augusta graduate went to serve in North Carolina, then New Jersey, Louisiana and Maryland.

The Tunkles, of Common Road in Dresden, have been married 43 years.

“She still needs me and she still feeds me,” he said.

The church welcomes everyone to attend the 9 a.m. installation ceremony and a reception that follows.