On a recent Sunday, the Reverend David Fisher rose to deliver a sermon on “Love Divine.” Draped in a bright purple velvet robe and standing in the sanctuary at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the congregation’s founding minister, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who served between 1847 and 1887.

Rev. Fisher, who, like Beecher, studied in Ohio and formerly served in the Midwest, thinks of his predecessor often: His portrait looms over the bookshelves in Rev. Fisher’s Brooklyn Heights office and another, more famous painting hangs downstairs – one depicting Beecher’s mock auction of a slave girl known as Pinky. Sometimes, when the church is empty, Rev. Fisher slips into the pew President Lincoln occupied when he came to hear Beecher preach.

As a new arrival at Plymouth Church, Rev. Fisher appreciates its great history. But he came to “write the next chapter.” Its themes will be “stability, organization, reconciliation … figuring out what it is we want to be to our neighbors.”

In recent years, the church’s ranks have dwindled, in part because the city has become more secular, and in part due to erratic leadership. Before Rev. Fisher arrived in September, there had been 10 ministers in 20 years, seven hired for interim terms.

“The place sits 2,000 people and they’re 150 on a Sunday. And to support this complex of buildings, and the things we need and want to do, we need more people and more income,” Rev. Fisher said. In particular, he hopes to attract young families: “You grow from the bottom up, because they’re the future.”

New congregants include recent arrivals to Brooklyn Heights and other booming Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as those from Lower Manhattan. Rev. Fisher’s arrival has boosted attendance by about 50 people a week. Attendees credit his wonderful sermons, but he remains modest. “Ministers don’t grow churches,” he said. “They make their organizations attractive.

“What that really means, for this generation, is creating community, because there are precious few places you can find community, especially in the big city.”

At Plymouth, Rev. Fisher has found a vibrant, if small, group. “It’s lively and very social,” he said. “It’s a city church, which means there’s diversity, and there’s diversity of faith. But they pay attention to me. When I speak, they listen. They’re very attentive, affirming, it’s very much a community, a great community to be a part of.”

It’s just what Rev. Fisher was looking for after years at large suburban churches in Minnesota. The 61-year-old plans to stay in Brooklyn for 7 to 10 years, and has the idea to retire to his wife’s family’s farm in Ohio afterward.

“A large part of suburban life is artificial; everybody looks the same, everybody acts the same. The suburbs are wonderful places to live, but they’re not really real. Life in the city is real because you’ve got everybody.”

In his former church, he had eight pastors on staff. “Here, it’s just me. It was like running a corporation at a large suburban church. I came here because I was anxious to get back to what I was called to do, to be a pastor of a manageable group of people.”

Though Rev. Fisher says the thought of Brooklyn had never entered his mind until he first heard about the position, he seems like a natural urbanite. “My wife and I went to Lowe’s, and there were large Hasidic families rolling carts down the aisles,” he said. “You wouldn’t see that in Edina!”

He and his wife have adopted the city-dwellers’ habit of eating out. Their favorite spot is the “hole-in-the-wall” Italian restaurant Noodle Pudding on Henry Street. He orders the tagliatelle Bolognese. “The meat sauce is astonishing.”

And he’s happy without a car. “I’m a walker. So what I do on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays, I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan and explore,” Rev. Fisher said. He frequents the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. “When the weather is nice, I go out in the evening and watch the sunset. It’s humbling.” Staring at the Statue of the Liberty, he thinks of his ancestors arriving on a ship “with no idea what they were going to do.” (His mother’s family is Irish; his father’s, German).

Rev. Fisher was born in Warsaw, Ind., while his father was in seminary. Initially, Rev. Fisher didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. But midway through college, a change came over him. “I was walking on the beach in the Florida, thinking what was I going to do with myself. And it came to me like a light bulb came on. There’s this thing I believe is true, and somebody’s got to manage it, tell it, proclaim it, and it’s me.”

He called his fiancee, Gloria. “She said, ‘No problem,’ not having any idea what she was getting into.'”

For one thing, the two have never owned their own home. They currently reside at Plymouth’s parsonage, a brownstone across the street. “It has these wide planks on the floor – it was registered in 1839, and it’s probably older than that,” Rev. Fisher said.

Then there are all the meetings and social engagements that come with being part of a preacher’s family. “This small church has at least twice as many evening committee meetings as my old church, which is just ironic,” Rev. Fisher said. “Tonight is my seventh night out in a row.”

Rev. Fisher first heard about the post at Plymouth Church after he returned from an annual motorcycle trip – he’s been taking them for years with a group of men he met at a church he led in Washington State. The trips are a respite from his role as a theologian. “We don’t talk about faith much. We’re just friends,” he said. An e-mail was waiting for him from the late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, who was on the church’s search committee.

Rev. Fisher has given plenty of thought to the role of a minister in his book “The 21st Century Pastor,” in which he took 10 metaphors from Paul and “tried to think what it might mean, in the contemporary world, to live in light of those images.”

He’s also written an as-yet unpublished book on preaching. Rev. Fisher explained his views on the subject: “The old traditional way of preaching was to have a proper vision or idea; you tell people what you’re going to say, give them three reasons, and tell them again. In a different world, that served the church well, but not in this age. So preaching has to become more narrative. In a narrative approach, the person doesn’t know what you’re going to say until the end.”

Rev. Fisher starts working on his sermons on Monday mornings. “You bet I do not want to do this at the last minute,” he said. He reads, does research, and “noodles” until Thursday. On Sunday morning, he reduces his notes to one sheet of paper with a few chief points. “A lot of it is in my memory at this point. And then something happens. It happens to me, it happens to the congregation. If people are paying attention, something good happens,” he said.

As Mrs. Fisher noted, “I’ve never heard the same sermon twice.”