Rev. Michael Peynado, of Westbury Divine Church of God, stepping down after 46 years

It doesn’t matter if it’s the crack of dawn or deep into the night. For decades, regardless of the circumstances, members of the Westbury Divine Church of God have known their pastor will be there for them.

“You need him, you call him, he’s there,” said Mavis Douglas, 72, of Amityville, who joined the church in the 1980s. “He’d always reach out, like he was looking out for my soul. To this day, even if he’s on vacation, I know I’ll hear from him.”

The Rev. Michael Peynado, who cofounded the church 46 years ago and is the senior pastor, said he usually operates on a “24-hour schedule.”

In addition to his work at the church, Peynado visits hospitals, nursing homes and prisons, delivers meals, takes people to the doctor, officiates at funerals and provides counseling.

Or simply checks in to see how someone is doing.

“I’m available to whoever calls me. . . . I’m proud of the fact that I wake up in the morning and I can breathe the breath of life and I can do some good to some people,” Peynado, 85, of Westbury, said in his office at the Brush Hollow Road church. “I shepherd them. Whatever their needs are, if I can meet that need, I’ll do the best I can.”

His impact has also been felt through his work revitalizing the local community, developing affordable housing for low-income families on Prospect Avenue through the Yes We Can Foundation and providing scholarships of up to $250 to young church members who complete high school and pursue a college education.

“He is a community-oriented leader,” said the Rev. Earl Noble, 44, a church member who has been mentored by Peynado since he was a kid. “He gets very involved here in Westbury and beyond. Pastor always uses the word of God to encourage you in whatever you’re doing.”

But in February, Peynado’s schedule will open up a little as he steps down from the pastorate — and hands those responsibilities over to the next generation.

“It’s time for a younger person to take the church to another level,” said Peynado, who will be honored by the Westbury/New Cassel NAACP on Feb. 10.

His advice for his successor, who has yet to be named, is simple: “Be faithful to this calling.”

A TAILOR WITH GROWING FAITH

Peynado grew up poor in the rural settlement of Bath, Jamaica. The eighth of nine children, he said he and his family often struggled to get enough to eat.

What little they had, his mother would “share with the other kids in the community,” recalled Peynado, who was taught from a young age “to love, to be God-fearing and to prioritize God.”

“Deep in my heart, I felt that the Lord would make a world for me, and I would not be stuck in poverty every day of my life,” he said.

Peynado, who disliked school, said he often skipped class. At 15, he dropped out for good. He said his mother, Ivy-Ann, encouraged him to pursue tailoring as his profession.

Under an apprenticeship in Bath, he learned to serge pants — using a serger machine to prevent fraying and give inner seams of garments a more professional look — and make buttonholes by hand and by treadle. He then furthered his craft in the capital city of Kingston, where he worked for a relative who was an accomplished tailor and bishop.

“I loved the job,” Peynado said. “I also knew I was going to enjoy clothing once I could afford it. I’m a tailor and I’m dressing people; I have to dress [well] too!”

It was in Kingston, too, where he said he made a full commitment to Christianity, became serious about Bible studies and was ultimately baptized.

Passionate about his faith, tailoring and breaking into the design industry, Peynado said he migrated to England by ship in 1960. He arrived in the cold and cloudy country eager to get into design school, but he said he couldn’t because he didn’t have the necessary educational requirements.

Instead, he said he was without money, wearing shoes that were falling apart. But Peynado pushed through, working as a laborer, an office clerk and a passenger guard with British Railways, enrolling in the Ebenezer Bible Institute in Birmingham and going to church frequently.

At church, he met his wife, Nomey, a nurse-in-training and fellow Jamaican.

“He had a nice head of hair and he was smartly dressed,” Nomey Peynado, 82, said with a laugh. “I said, ‘That one will do.’ ”

SETTING SIGHTS ON U.S.

After 12 years in England, Peynado said that, having visited New York for his sister’s wedding in Hollis, Queens, he was determined to move to the United States for more opportunities. With Nomey and their three children, they relocated to the Bronx and then to Westbury, where they stayed with friends.

Settling in their first home in Garden City Park, Peynado said he worked as a tailor at a dry cleaning agency, a shoe salesman in a department store and a postal uniform salesman, all while going to night school for his GED, which he earned in 1974.

He then studied at Nassau Community College and a Christian Bible school in Freeport, was ordained as a minister and started teaching and preaching regularly.

By 1975, Peynado was running his own men’s and women’s clothing store — Mike’s Tailoring, Alteration and Ready to Wear — at 144 Post Ave. in Westbury.

At the store, which was open for 10 years, he sold ties and button-down shirts, as well as skirts and blouses, and guided young professionals on what to wear for job interviews. He stitched buttonholes, shortened sleeves, repaired jeans and — most of all — connected with people.

Peynado was known by his customers to be kind, soft-spoken and “looking like he stepped out of Brooks Brothers magazine,” recalled Douglas, who said she first met him when, while in town, she needed to use a restroom and his was the one business that didn’t turn her away.

“Something about his personality and presence just captivated me,” she said. “I’d keep going back and talking with him, bringing clothes in. … He listened.”

HOSTING SERVICES AT HOME

Outside of shop hours, Peynado was mending more than just clothes for the community.

In July 1978, he, his wife and clergy members he first met in England — the Rev. Euton Watson and Sylvia Watson, Deacon Adam Dawkins and Hortense Dawkins, and the Rev. Franklin Golding — cofounded a ministry, then called Divine Congregational Church of God. He was appointed as its pastor in August of that year.

Peynado, then 39, said he hosted worship services on Sunday in his home and was involved in youth and prayer meetings. In the beginning, the ministry consisted of just the three families, but in less than a year, he said the congregation expanded to several dozen people.

In addition to trying to instill strong moral values in people of all ages, Peynado said he and his wife were motivated to provide a safer environment for families and children to grow up in — away from bad influences.

“When I came into this community, there used to be a lot of drug dealing and trouble brewing on Prospect Avenue,” Peynado recalled. “We used to go out there every Friday evening and march on the street with police leading us, saying ‘Down With Dope, Up With Hope!’ We did that for many years, and I know people on that block are much safer now.”

Peynado and his congregation also started setting their minds on building a church.

Westbury Mayor Peter Cavallaro was 12 when he first met Peynado while working at a deli on Post Avenue, across the street from the tailor shop. He remembers “Mike the Tailor” coming in every day, ordering chamomile tea and a bran muffin, and “always being such a nice, dignified human being.”

“Just the way he conducted himself, carried himself — he impressed me even then,” Cavallaro recalled.

He said Peynado would speak of his desire to build a church. “He was always cheerful and confident that God would help him prevail,” Cavallaro said. “He was inspirational to me.”

Those prayers were answered in the form of a piece of overgrown land and a dilapidated, 1,500-square-foot building on Brush Hollow Road, which the ministry purchased in 1979.

In 1980, the church opened.

The moment was bittersweet. Although their dream had been realized, the Peynados were also dealt a tragic blow, with the death of their son, Joseph, 10, from leukemia that same year.

“I don’t question God because he gave him to us and there’s a reason why he took him,” Peynado said. “He was a lovely boy. . . . We’d go swimming and go to the ice-cream parlor together.”

AIDING NEW CASSEL

Twenty years later, in 2000, Peynado took on a new cause: helping to redevelop New Cassel.

The North Hempstead hamlet had long been rattled by drug problems and gang activity. At the time, “It lacked both affordable housing and a downtown center, and suffered from environmental contamination, overcrowded and illegal housing, and community despair and discord,” according to a case study prepared by Hofstra University in 2011.

Bishop Lionel Harvey, senior pastor at the First Baptist Cathedral of Westbury, had been approached by officials at the nonprofit Sustainable Long Island to help revitalize the area. He in turn sought the help and guidance of Peynado, one of the first pastors he’d met when he took over the pulpit in 1998.

Peynado immediately pushed the cause through civic and political outreach, said Harvey, who, as president of the Unified New Cassel Community Revitalization Corp., appointed him vice president.

“He was instrumental in transforming the area,” Harvey said. Over the next 10 to 12 years, he said they worked in tandem with community members and officials to turn New Cassel into a well-lit, walkable community with mixed-use development, attractive streetscapes, a supermarket, dental and doctor’s offices and other businesses. “He was that calming voice, he pulled people together and cast a vision for what we wanted it to look like,” Harvey said.

HOW THE CHURCH GREW

The Brush Hollow Road church had transformed, too. As membership grew, so did the need for a larger building: “Currently, they are forced to hold several Masses each Sunday in order to accommodate everyone,” according to an article in the Westbury Times in 2002.

Peynado said the congregation had about 150 members but only around 60 could fit in the church.

Church officials broke ground in 2002 on a new 12,700-square-foot facility, situated on the same site as the original church. Today, the church includes an expansive main sanctuary, four classrooms for Sunday school, a basement fellowship hall for social functions and weddings and a well-stocked pantry for food distribution to the needy twice a month.

“When you look at that building, you see a great success story,” Harvey said. “He’s shown you could start with seemingly nothing and you can build monuments.”

‘NEVER A DULL MOMENT’

In Peynado’s church office on a recent January day, he and his wife reflected on their lives and work in Westbury — and what the future holds.

“We’re going to miss it, but we’ll still be around,” Nomey Peynado said. “Our home is still here. But we can take more vacations than usual.”

At this, the pastor smiles. It’s clear that his work will never truly be done.

He might indulge in one of his hobbies, like fishing and cooking, but he said he also plans to teach and continue his visits to nursing homes and hospitals.

“There’s never a dull moment, my brother, once you’re in the ministry,” he said. “Because there’s always people needing help, and you can’t say there’s nothing to do.”

Regarding the late-night phone calls, he laughed: “I don’t think that would ever stop.”