In his year at Bethany Covenant Church, Pastor Joel Kruggel said he has tried to meet the changing needs of the community while keeping the church connected to the world beyond Bedford.

“The world’s changing,” Kruggel said in his office this week. “Just managing change has been a priority.”

Kruggel began as senior pastor at the church last July, and in that time has worked with the leadership team to develop an “aggressive vision for the future.” That has included providing more worship opportunities, he said.

“A lot of people, they want to get to the church, but they can’t,” he said, due to commitments, such as student sports practices or games, scheduled Sunday mornings. “We’ve got to be out there meeting people when it works for their schedule.”

The church now offers services at 8:45 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., and Kruggel said he has thought about the possibility adding service on Saturday evenings, as many Catholic churches do.

“We’ve tweaked the feel of the Sunday morning services,” he said. The early service is traditional, and the later service is more contemporary, with music that relies more on drums and guitars and sermons that involved youngsters.

“Our younger folks, our younger families, have been yearning for something more contemporary,” he said.

He said it has been important for the church to both catalyze change and stabilize old traditions, “so people feel like, ‘OK, there’s new directions, but not everything is up for grabs.’”

Kruggel comes to the church from western Michigan, and before that was a college campus chaplain at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., he said.

“Living in the college world, you’re always in the world of new thoughts, new ideas, intellectual challenges,” he said.

That experience has helped in his attempt to “flex to the world around us without giving in on the essentials,” he said.

Kruggel said he has also tried to keep a “global focus” in the church, keeping people aware of issues such as the plight of Sudanese refugees or human trafficking.

“What are the issues of injustice, where the church needs to speak out?” he said. “We also live in the midst of a larger environment. A lot of people need to be healed with God’s love and grace.”

The church also plays very local roles, he said, within individual families.

“It’s a very family-oriented church,” he said.

Kruggel said he has spent much of the last year inviting people to his home and getting to know them. The church offers a marriage skills class, he said, and he and his wife have a small group that meets in his home.

“We really try to build into marriages,” he said.

The church is also hosting financial management courses, he said.

“I find a lot of people whose marriages are in trouble can trace it back to financial stress,” he said.

Kruggel had previously lived in New England, working at churches in Boston and Danvers, Mass., and said it was good to return. The church, set atop a hill on more than 50 acres of property in Bedford, has more than 500 members.

“Sometimes, we’ll actually come up here at night,” he said, when the pretty white building is lit up. “Sometimes we just find people in the parking lot. They’re just here to meditate or pray.”

He and his wife enjoy cross country skiing, he said, and have made New Hampshire their home over the past year.

“The natural beauty of the creation here is something we find very renewing,” he said. “I have that sense that this is God’s place for me and my wife right now.”