Surrey, B.C., church switches affiliation to be more inclusive

A Surrey, B.C., Baptist church has switched its affiliation to a more inclusive religious group, 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 said, he came out as gay and married 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 congregation at large. When the pastor at the time 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 feel comfortable with the church's affiliation, given the CBWC's views against gay marriage.

Now, after a decade of coming to terms with how the church treats 2SLGBTQ+ people, Southpoint's members have decided to move the church to the Canadian Association for Baptist Freedoms.

"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, had been dedicated at Southpoint, and Carlson said it felt good to see the church take a stand and accept his 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 Baxter Smith became 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 toward 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 became a member of the Canadian Association for Baptist Freedoms this year after its congregation voted to change its original affiliation.

The association states on the homepage of its website that it aims to be "a safe and welcoming environment in which Baptists can share all concerns and points of view without fear of being marginalised."

After the change in affiliation, Baxter Smith said she "felt like this big weight had fallen off me, and we could finally now be who we were without any threat."

CBC News has contacted the CBWC for comment but has yet to receive a reply.

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.