Rev. Roland Ratmeyer
The Rev. Roland Ratmeyer was born in Freeport, Illinois. He graduated from Central College, Pella, Iowa, in 1959 and from New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1963. During seminary he served as an intern pastor at the Hope Reformed Church in Los Angeles.
He was ordained in 1963 and he and his wife Una served as missionaries in the Lethrop Homes Public Housing Project in Chicago under the Board of Domestic Missions of the Reformed Church. In 1967 he was installed as the pastor of the Church of the Good News which he helped organize in Chicago. He received a Master of Theology degree from McCormick Seminary in 1972.
In 1974 he became the pastor of the Brighton Heights Reformed Church on Staten Island, New York, where he co-founded Project Hospitality, an interfaith organization to serve the needy. He received a Doctor of Ministry degree from the New York Theological Seminary in 1982. In 1988 he became the pastor of Old Bergen Church in Jersey City, NJ, a Union Reformed and Presbyterian church.
From 2003 until the present he has served as the interim pastor in eight Reformed Churches in New Jersey and New York.
Roland and Una have three married children and six grand children. Roland enjoys running and biking. He continues to run competitively, the NYC Marathon being one of his favorites. In 2008 he completed a Sea-to-Sea bike tour to raise money to help end the cycle of poverty. He repeated this cross-country ride, from Los Angeles to New York City in the summer of 2013. He completed the final leg of the ride through Canada this past summer to again raise funds in support of poverty projects of the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church.