Jeff was 12 years old when a priest knocked on the door of the Olsson family home and invited him to attend church. Jeff accepted the offer and eventually became a born again Christian, played in a church band, taught Sunday school and served as an altar boy. By the age of 32 he had finished ministry training and became an ordained minister in the Anglican Church of Canada.
It soon became apparent that some of his parishioners had been forced to attend an abusive church run residential school system that stripped children of their culture and language and forced them to become Christians. Across Canada 150,000 aboriginal children were affected by this school system. 80,000 former students were represented in a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government and the Churches that administered the schools.
In the years that followed Jeff watched conservative Anglicans rebel rather than accept homosexuals as equal under God and allow them to marry. It quickly became obvious that it was a dogmatic system of belief that was the problem, not the homosexuals or the aboriginals. At first Jeff wondered why God would allow this to happen to these people, he then realized God was not involved at all.
It was time to leave ‘faith’ behind.
