formatting theme

I’m new to wordpress, so this is likely easy stuff. I applied the vertigo-2column to the site I’m doing for my church here:
https://69.94.26.218/palmvistabaptist.com/blog/

I want to have all the sections set up as pages not posts. How do I have the home page set up as a page and not a section that has all the latest posts. I would also like to have the pastor’s notes set up as a posting page, how do I change that?

Lastly, how do I reduce the height of the footer? I took out a bunch of stuff we weren’t going to need.