Dave has been ordained for over 40 years, having served in Nova Scotia where he recived a M.Div from the University of King's College, Canada's oldest Anglican University and in Alberta and Ontario before coming to British Columbia. There he became involved as a chaplain at the Mission and Ferndale institutions. He has continued to work in parish ministry with small parishes which might otherwise be denied regular, affordable pastoral leadership.
Dave has received training as a trauma EMDR (Eye Movement and Desensitization) therapist which assists him in both the delivery of prison and parish ministry as well as working with adicted people through his position with the VisionQuest Recovery Society. This training, his scholarly curiosity, and his background in industrial psychology has led him to explore the Emergent Church Movement, sometimes referred to as "contextual theology" or "process theology".
The emergent church is a place for people to feel that they belong within the Christian community even if they feel judged as "misfits" (for example, they may feel that orthodox theology is irreconcilable with modern reflective thought).
The emergent church movement understands and reflects the great history of Scripture as a historical, metaphorical but not literal expression of truth. Literal interpretation of Scripture first surfaced in the second century and re-emerged in the last 200 years as a result of the Enlightenment. The latter movement required that all ideas and theorems, including Christian belief, be proveavable in a scientific fashion, with the result that a deep understanding of the power of spirituality and spiritual belief was lost. The Bible contains sacred truth which is carried through our great sagas of faith. Attempts to understand Scripture in a literal way diminishes the importance of the Bible, causing people to lose their connection with spirituality. Christianity is about faith, not about proof texts. Faith is understood as a verb which is alive and which grows; not about a set of static beliefs rooted in improbable theorems. This journey is summed up in this way by Catholic theologian Stephen Bevans, who wrote:
There is no such thing as "theology" there is only contextual theology...the attempt to understand Christian faith in terms of a particular context is really a theological imperative and cannot be something on the fringes of the theological enterprise. It is at the very center of what it means to do theology in today's world.
Dave has observed that misfits often feel that they do not belong in the Christian church or that others push them out. Dave believes that we find God in the chaos of life. He embraces a vision of the Church as open and inclusive of all people and their views. Dave urges you to "come as you are".