Moderator’s Page

At least three key periods, rather than moments, have informed my faith journey and formed who I am today. The first period is my childhood. I was born in the farm country of southeastern Ontario and baptized in the local Presbyterian Church, being brought up in the faith tradition of my parents. Home, farm life, and the church of my childhood formed the foundation of who I am today. The routines of home, farm life, assisting my father in beekeeping operations, and the routines of church were often boring. Still, these were important and formative, like the repetitive practices of a musician learning scales, a performer rehearsing lines, and a craftsperson repeating their skills and improving over time. While I grumbled about such life as a child, I am very nostalgic for those days now. I speculate the repetition experienced in my childhood formed an appreciation for liturgy and the repetition that comes with ministry, which, while sometimes can feel boring, can also be deeply grounding and formative, and give time for improvement.

The years spent at university and seminary mark the next key period in my faith journey. While I did learn about some biblical stories in Sunday School, my familiarity with the Bible was very limited. The Bible I was given after graduating from Sunday School was also a King James Bible with delicate pages and stiff binding. I recall being told to read the Bible as though God was speaking directly to me, and there didn’t seem to be much room for questioning and doubting. The pressure of paying attention to God was exhausting, and my attempts to read the Bible were more a cure for insomnia than inspirational. Ironically, it was within a secular university during an undergraduate degree in The College of Humanities, Carleton University, that I was reading the Bible alongside Mesopotamian myths, Hindu sacred texts, and ancient Greek and Roman literature that I developed an appreciation for the remarkable way that stories revealed the human condition and the breadth of human expression. The college cultivated a love for literature, including the Bible, in which all manner of questions and conversations were possible. This experience had a profound impact on my approach to biblical texts.

Knox College continued to deepen that appreciation for the Bible, especially for the context of preaching and its application to the realities of our time. When I started at seminary, I considered faith, spirituality, salvation, sin, morality, and even Bible reading as a more private individualistic affair reinforced communally through worship and Bible study. However, studying theology was as eye-opening as my experience with the Bible during undergraduate studies. I experienced some spiritual growing pains during my time at Knox because my faith changed significantly during those years as it challenged the faith of my youth. I began to see the distinct ways that Jesus and the gospels addressed this world’s social concerns and realized that the matters of faith were more communal than individualistic. Many of my views changed during those years as I discovered that the Bible doesn’t support my views as much as I had assumed or hoped. It was helpful that during my theological education and preparation for ministry in the church, I had an opportunity to work with the Boarding Homes Ministry in Toronto, which helped me to understand the gospel in the context of those living on the margins.

The next key period in my faith journey that shaped the person I am today can be addressed in the next question because that formative period comes from serving the congregation of St. Andrew’s, Sackville, with whom I have ministered since the time I was ordained and inducted to that charge.

What have been your most memorable experiences in serving the church, and how have those particular experiences shaped or guided your views?

The 18 years of ministering among the people of St. Andrew’s have provided several memorable experiences, some of which were joyful, affirming, and supportive, and others quite difficult and challenging. It was more the challenging and painful experiences in my ministry and personal life that provided the most memorable moments of learning and growth.

Broadly speaking, the challenges in my personal life that could not be hidden stripped away any façade of a minister having a life together. This, coupled with the grace and support of the congregation through difficult chapters and setbacks, taught me that I am allowed to be imperfectly human. I believe this deepened my relationship with the congregation, as they shared their difficult moments and imperfections with me as their pastor.

Challenges to my leadership, while feeling undermining at the time, also helped guide my understanding of leadership within the church. In the beginning, I assumed that leadership in the church was about steering the ship, providing vision, and leading where I felt the congregation needed to go, but my attempts at “leadership” were often unsuccessful. The congregation helped me realize that I was one of many partners in ministry, and my task was to be a minister of Word and Sacraments and to support the session, board and congregation in our collective discernment of the direction we might be called to go as we face the challenges that present themselves.

Ministry with St. Andrew’s has also afforded me several opportunities to serve the presbytery, synod and national church. The opportunity to work with other congregations and persons through visitations, amalgamations, closures, conflicts, and personnel challenges has provided tremendous insight into congregational life and leadership.

The theme of the 2025 General Assembly, “A Future and a Hope,” is taken from Jeremiah 29:11. As The Presbyterian Church in Canada marks its 150th anniversary, how would you describe your preferred future and your hope for our denomination?

What immediately comes to mind is Romans 8:24-25: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Certainly, as a minister working in the church, I would prefer a future that looked more certain and secure than precarious, but I am also growing accustomed to uncertainty. We have much to celebrate in our past, but I hope that nostalgia for previous times does not prevent us from having faith and hope for a future we may not be able to envision yet. The words from Jeremiah offer the assurance that there is a future for the people of God, but it was during the exilic period in which the future of God’s people seemed uncertain. Jeremiah was preparing the people for a long exile and warned against prophets and diviners who peddled their dreams and visions. Instead, rather than getting caught up in false prophesy and visions or suspending life until a return to good times, Jeremiah encourages the people to simply go about their lives, building homes, planting gardens, marrying and having children, multiplying, and above all to “seek the welfare of the city where [they are], and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare [they] will find [their] welfare.” Jeremiah’s words to God’s people in exile were words to affirm that they could be the people of God in a different land and if they are to have a future, they would need to persevere by going about their lives. We will not be the church of 150 or even 50 years ago. The setting of the church today is a vastly different landscape, but we persist in our calling to be the church through uncertainty because we have something worth working for. We hope in what we do not see and wait for it with patience.

In a culture which is increasingly distancing itself from the context of “Christendom” for many reasons, what would you say to someone who asks what it means to be Presbyterian?

Firstly, I am rarely, if ever asked, what it means to be Presbyterian, and “Christendom” is an unknown or irrelevant concept for many.
However, like the culture, I want to distance myself from “Christendom,” and I think that The Presbyterian Church in Canada has taken steps to distance itself from certain negative aspects of “Christendom” as well. As Douglas J. Hall defines Christendom, it “means literally the dominion or sovereignty of the Christian religion”, which does not necessarily align with the reign of Jesus Christ or the message of the gospel but has been more about the imposition of Eurocentric cultural assumptions on others. While Christendom has contributed amazing art, music, architecture, and a wealth of profound philosophical and theological study to the world, it has also inflicted deep wounds through conquest, colonialism, antisemitism, racism, and the marginalization of minorities.

Given that our culture has been distancing itself from Christendom and organized religion, partly because of the injustices that it has been involved with, when I talk about what it means to be Presbyterian, I often talk about how the church has come to recognize, confess, and apologize for the wrongs of Christendom it has participated in. I talk about the church’s work towards healing and reconciliation, particularly with respect to our relationship with Indigenous people and our participation in Residential Schools. Being Presbyterian means that as an institution, we must face and address the racism that has occurred, and continues to occur within our church by understanding it and developing anti-racism initiatives to mitigate this injustice. Being Presbyterian also means acknowledging how the church dehumanized and harmed LGBTQI people as we work towards being welcoming, inclusive and loving communities of faith. I think these are ways that The Presbyterian Church in Canada bears witness to the ministry of reconciliation that the gospel of Jesus Christ reveals to us and how we actively distance ourselves from the ills of Christendom.

I believe these actions of the church mentioned provide an important witness to society today. While the culture has distanced itself from organized religion and institutions, society seems to gravitate toward individualism, which allows one to easily call out the wrongs of church and other institutions while distancing oneself from the responsibility of reconciliation and community repair. The other thing we see in our culture today is a kind of gravitation toward dangerous collective behaviour where one might take up a cause with those of like-mindedness and become oblivious to and unaccountable for the harms it inflicts – the storming of the capital on January 6, 2021, is one example. Both of these seemingly contrasting behaviours of individualism and collectivity allow for self-righteousness to flourish and to further entrench a divided society. In contrast to individualism and group uniformity, our diverse Presbyterian Church in Canada allows space for unity and diversity, harmony and dissonance, agreement and disagreement. Our governing structure also makes provision for the unpleasant aspects of our own history and of our present to be brought into the light for the whole church to see, acknowledge, and then work together toward healing the body of Christ that we have harmed by our collective sin.

In the year you would serve as Moderator, what particular focus would you bring to that role and how are you equipped for that ministry?

At this point, given that serving as moderator remains uncertain, I am also uncertain as to what particular focus I would bring to the role of Moderator. I am humbled and honoured that the presbyteries that put my name forward as a nominee believe that I have been equipped with gifts for this ministry, which may have to do with my work serving as clerk for the Synod of the Atlantic Provinces.

Should the church call me, by way of electing me as the sole nominee to serve as Moderator, I would prefer to give focus to matters that arise at General Assembly and throughout the year. In my understanding of the role of Moderator of the General Assembly, it is not to bring a particular focus or agenda but to serve the church by giving attention to the things that the church is focused on currently. I realize that that is a long way of stating TBA.

Nevertheless, as I highlighted above, the church continues to focus on the work of reconciliation, anti-racism, and inclusion, which I think deserves attention. Also, I think it is important to give attention to the challenges congregations face as we learn to navigate being the church with hope amid uncertainty, which the narratives of hope and possibility aim to explore. I could see these as possible things to focus on in the role of Moderator.