Steve Belko is the new pastor at Montgomery City Christian Church. He serves as an interim minister for the Disciples of Christ denomination in several rural Missouri communities.

Belko teaches American government, political science and U. S. history courses at John Wood Community College in Quincy, Ill., and U. S. history courses at St. Louis Community College-Meramec. He was the executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council from Jan. 2015-Nov. 2021.

From Aug. 2005 to Dec. 2014, Belko was associate professor of history, director of the graduate program in Early American Studies and Director of the graduate program in historic preservation at the University of West Florida. He taught courses on Jacksonian America (1815-1850), the Early Republic (1763-1815), the Southern Frontier (1660-1860), U. S. Constitutional History (to 1877) and Historic and Heritage Preservation.
Belko has published several monographs: The Invincible Duff Green: Whig of the West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), America’s Hundred Years’ War: U. S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763-1858 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), The Triumph of the Antebellum Free Trade Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the 2013 Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016) and Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021). He has also published numerous award-winning articles on various subjects of early 19th-century American history.

Belko received his PhD in history from Mississippi State University and was a research historian for MSU’s Social Science Research Center. Immediately upon earning his PhD, he served from 2001-2005 as the director of the Michigan Lighthouse Project, a government-nonprofit partnership created to preserve and transfer ownership of America’s historic lighthouses under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000. He earned a Master of Arts degree in history from Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) and a Bachelor of Arts degree – with a double major in history and political science – from Drury College (now Drury University).

Belko was born in Keokuk, Iowa, a small town on the Mississippi River, raised in White Hall, Ill., and Aurora, Neb., and graduated from Quincy (Ill.) High School. His parents were born and raised in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis, and he comes from a long line of families that settled in Missouri during its territorial and early statehood period and became prominent in the development of the St. Louis area.

Belko and his wife, Mindy, who was born and raised in Lake Orion, Mich., have a daughter, 19-year old Savannah, who is a sophomore at Drury University, and a son, 16-year old AJ, who is a junior at Francis Howell High School in O’Fallon.