A Surrey, B.C., Baptist church has switched its affiliation to a more inclusive one, more than a decade after a gay couple who were members forced a reckoning over how they were being treated.
Colin Evans was on the board of The Church at Southpoint around 2008 when it became a member of the Canadian Baptists of Western Canada (CBWC).
Around that time, he says he came out as gay, marrying David Carlson, with whom he now has a child.
For years, he says the two sat at the back of the church and felt excluded from the church’s congregation at large. When their pastor left, Evans and Carlson say there was pressure on the church to take a more firm stand and exclude the couple entirely.
Evans says the church’s next pastor, Anne Baxter Smith, accepted them as members of the congregation, but they still didn’t felt comfortable with the church’s affiliation, given its views on gay marriage.
Now, after a decade of coming to terms with how the church treats 2SLGBTQ+ people, Southpoint has decided to move to a more inclusive branch.
“I just have nothing but pride for the church and where it’s come to,” Evans said.
“The people have changed. So many people have come up and said, ‘Thank you so much for sticking with us, because not only have you changed the church, but you’ve changed me, or you’ve changed my heart, or you’ve changed how I view, you know, LGBT people.'”
Evans and Carlson’s child, Becca, has been baptized at Southpoint, and Carlson said it felt good to see the church take a stand and accept him and his husband’s family.
“It was a strange and beautiful thing to see a church stepping into its role as a protector of queer people instead of a persecutor of queer people,” he said.
Change came after meeting with pastor
Evans acknowledged that, for many years, it was a very uncomfortable existence for him and his husband when they went to church, and he heard many whispers while they sat in the pews.
“Our choice was to [either] leave and just wash your hands of it, or a choice was to just be in silence in the back row every Sunday and force the conversations to happen,” he said. “And that’s what we did.”
When Anne Baxter Smith took over as the church’s pastor, she said she decided to have a frank conversation with the couple about how they fit into the church — a conversation that eventually left them all in tears.
“I really am grateful for Colin and David. I feel like they changed my ministry. They changed my life. They changed my understanding of God,” she said.
“Kudos to them. They stayed put. They stayed at the table and forced us into the discomfort of talking about this and finding a way.”
After the meeting, Baxter Smith says she began to use resources from the U.S. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in order to be more inclusive towards 2SLGBTQ+ people.
Church changed its affiliation this year
However, the pastor says that some Alberta-based churches in the CBWC took objection to Southpoint’s inclusion of 2SLGBTQ+ people and asked the CBWC to issue disciplinary letters.
In 2022, after deliberations in its general assembly, the CBWC issued an identity statement that defined marriage as only being between a man and a woman.
The next year, it laid out a disciplinary process against churches that weren’t in compliance with the identity statement — which is when Southpoint decided to leave,
The church is now a member of the Canadian Association of Baptists for Freedoms after nearly all of its board members voted to change its original affiliation.
“I felt like this big weight had fallen off of me, and we could finally now be who we were without any threat,” Baxter Smith said.
Evans and Carlson, who have since moved to Victoria, said they were both thankful to their former church.
“Change doesn’t have to happen loudly. It can happen just by sitting and just by being present,” Evans said.