Who We Are
We exist for people who are already serving at the thresholds of life and cannot legally stand at the front of the room. What follows is who we are, who we are for, and what we ask of the people who join us.
We are a Canadian Evangelical Christian denomination. We say that plainly, and first, because it matters and because nobody should get several steps into this before discovering it.
We are a governing body on record with the Office of the Registrar General, which means we can request the registration of our clergy as Marriage Officiants authorized to perform marriages anywhere in Ontario. We hold that standing on the same footing as the Catholic, Anglican, United, Presbyterian and Baptist churches.
Over 450 members currently serve across the province. Wayne Prevett is the Governing Official.
What makes us different
Our standing is the same as theirs. What we ask of our members is not.
We have no prior education requirements for ordination; our own training is required of everyone. We place no gender requirements on membership. We do not govern your church, your worship, or your ministry style, and there are no further annual assessments. What we do ask is what any denomination asks of its clergy: agreement with our beliefs and our values, an annual review of your ministry, and accountability to the Governing Official. That does not change, and there is nothing behind it.
Of the many governing bodies on record in Ontario, only a small number will authorize people who serve outside a traditional congregational structure. Most of those few are not Christian bodies. We are.
We exist for the chaplain who has sat with families for fifteen years and cannot legally marry them. For the church planter with a congregation of thirty and no denomination behind them. For the youth worker, the camp director, the hospice care provider, the missionary home on furlough, the retired minister still being asked.
And we equip them — because it is entirely possible to complete years of theological education and never sit in a single class on how to lead a wedding or a funeral. We know, because we did.
That gap is why ministers walk away from this work. Closing it is the reason we are here.
Into homes, hospitals, funeral homes, halls, gardens and gravesides — wherever a family stands at a threshold.
Each of our members holds a pastoral charge: an area of Ontario, and the people within it entrusted to their care. Read about our pastoral charges.
This did not begin as a plan to authorize clergy. It began in a street ministry in St. Thomas, Ontario, where Wayne and Rosanne Prevett served community dinners for 125 people every Tuesday night and ran a lunch program for 35 children.
Among the obvious unmet needs were the rites of passage. Weddings. Funerals. The moments that matter most in a life, with nobody available to hold them properly.
This path is written for people already serving. It carries the legal requirements and none of the business building.
If you already have a ministry
If your aim is to make weddings, funerals and other rites of passage your full-time work, that is a different path and it lives on our sister site.