Meet Pastor Gregg Miller, First Presbyterian Church of Cody
The First Presbyterian Church of Cody went through a major transition in 2025, with the retirement of longtime pastor Pat Montgomery. But the 120-year-old institution has welcomed a new pastor, who brings a fresh energy and perspective to the congregation, and the community.
From Princeton to Park County
Pastor Gregg Miller is a native of southern California, whose life path took him from pursuing a computer programming degree at Cal State Fullerton to a degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. “The chair of the religious studies department at Cal State Fullerton was a member of my home church,” said Miller. “And he had watched what I did at church, because I was in choir and youth group, and skits and things. And he said, ‘Why don’t you come into religious studies?’”
After graduating from Princeton, Miller served three years as youth minister at a church in Newcastle, Pennsylvania before moving on to a small Presbyterian church in a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. “Fort Calhoun is 15 miles from downtown Omaha,” said Miller. “We got there, and it was charged as the ‘Old People’s Church.’ After 30 years, we had grown that church, and we built a preschool, an elementary program, and a very productive youth program. We became the ‘Young People’s Church.’”
Miller and his wife, Cheryl, raised their five children in Fort Calhoun before they began a search for their next mission. “I could have gone to Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, other places in Nebraska had offered, but they just didn’t feel right to my wife and I,” he said. But then, Cody became available.
“We talked (with the hiring committee) for a long time, just even on the first interview,” said Miller. “And then we had another one, we talked for hours again.” Less than 6 months after Pastor Montgomery retired, the Millers came to Cody for a visit, and the decision was unanimous on all sides. September 8, 2025, was Miller’s first Sunday as the pastor for the First Presbyterian Church of Cody.
Miller’s Vision for Cody
Miller has experience growing churches, and he has similar aspirations for the Cody congregation. First and foremost, Miller said he wants to help people grow in their faith – and then together, live out that faith, especially when it comes to eradicating food insecurity within the community. On that track, he said he would like to grow the visibility of the church’s two primary outreach missions – Food 4 Kids, and First Stop.
The Food 4 Kids program, which began in 2013, is spearheaded primarily by the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches in Cody. The premise of the program is to provide bags full of food for school children to take home on weekends. “We want to expand that and get that stigma out of there for kids to go, ‘I don’t have enough food on the weekend, because my parents are working, or they’re gone or they’re neglectful or whatever,’” said Miller. “We’re only reaching 130, 150 kids (per week).”
The other program in which Miller would like the church to take a more active role is First Stop, a coordinated effort by multiple churches in Cody to provide assistance to people who are facing emergency financial troubles.
“The community I came from, we developed a pilot program in kind of a lower income county,” said Miller. “We partnered with our food pantry to help develop a program that walks with people out of their food insecurity and helps them get a budget, stick to a budget, understand their patterns of living. If there’s mental health issues, we tried to have counselors to walk with them so they’re understanding and growing and learning.”
In addition to these community programs, Miller said he is invested in growing the Presbyterian Church’s youth education, using the building’s existing Sunday School classrooms. “We have wonderful facilities,” said Miller, “and we want to use them to help people have a place to grow in faith, friendship and themselves.”
Collaboration Is Key
In a town the size of Cody, Miller said it’s important to strengthen ties between the congregations to better serve the youth of this community. “Cody has a plethora of churches who are just silos,” he said. “They don’t seem to interact with each other too much, whether it’s because of bad history or whatever. So we’re trying to start with the mainline churches, the Methodist, Episcopal, ELCA Lutheran Church and us, to actually host a Vacation Bible School this year here in Cody.”
From Miller’s perspective, what stands in the way of the church fulfilling the commission of Jesus to “love one another” comes down to words. “We get bogged down fighting over words, and we fight over how someone is baptized or how someone receives communion,” he said. “Those are non essentials for me. They’re important, but making sure people are fed, clothed, housed, all those things that Jesus came to teach us about, that’s the more important thing.”
Miller said this philosophy goes back to his childhood, growing up in Southern California, where immigrants from all over the world came together to build their lives. “We were a very diverse neighborhood,” he said. “You had to learn to talk to each other. And it was the churches that created the community. And so that’s one of my goals here, is to help build community back. That’s part of the vision that drew me here – not just helping the church survive, but helping the church to thrive.”
Contact Information:
First Presbyterian Church
Pastor Gregg Miller
[email protected]
Office phone: 307-587-2647
Sunday Service: 9:30 am to 10:45
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Wendy Corr
Freelance Writer
Wendy Corr has been a part of Cody's goings-on since moving here in 1998. Whether keeping residents informed as the news director at the Big Horn Radio Network, entertaining audiences with Dan Miller's Cowboy Music Revue, or serving as the music and worship director at the First Presbyterian Church in Cody, Wendy has been plugged into Buffalo Bill's town in the Rockies for over 25 years. Wendy is an award-winning broadcaster and interviewer, as well, and loves to tell the stories of the people of Cody.