Rev. Canon Erin sits across from me at The Roost Café, her voice carrying both the weight of disappointment and the fire of unwavering hope. She's talking about the new Pope Leo XIV, about broken promises wrapped in progressive packaging, about a church that blesses with one hand while condemning with the other."I'm disappointed," she says with the kind of honesty that cuts through religious platitudes. "These things that I like about him—his compassion for immigrants, his critique of unjust policies—that's where it ends. I did a deep dive, and he hasn't been saying anything else that I love."This is the voice of someone who refuses to settle for crumbs of inclusion disguised as a feast.When Safe Isn't AssumedRev. Canon Erin doesn't have the luxury of assuming church is safe for everyone. With trans nephews, a gay aunt, and gay children of her own, she's intimately familiar with the casualties of conditional love. At All Saints Anglican Church in King City, she's created something radical: a place where LGBTQ+ people can exist without asterisks."Church is not safe for a lot of people," she explains, her voice gaining intensity. "You have to know this. You have to be aware of this. We want to create this bubble of safety, but we have to be explicit about it because that's not the general consensus out there."The church runs a booth at Pride, hosts safe services, and operates with the understanding that explicit inclusion isn't virtue signaling—it's survival. "They need to know it's safe. They need to know there's safe language, that the songs are safe. We're not going to be singing about things that make anybody uncomfortable."The Breaking PointI know exactly why Rev. Erin's ministry matters because I lived the alternative. My twin daughters and I had been going to Catholic mass with my mother and father every Sunday. What started as family tradition became impossible to sustain when the realities of institutional rejection became too visible."There was this whole scripture about the man and the woman," I tell her, remembering that particular Sunday. "The priest, God bless him—he's amazing, he baptized the girls, he was very open. While he was saying it, he saw me and my mom and the girls sitting there and was looking right at us. It wasn't like in a bad way, it was kind of like in an 'oh shit' way."That moment crystallized what so many LGBTQ+ families face: the painful gap between personal acceptance and institutional doctrine. When my family found All Saints Anglican Church, my Italian Catholic mother surprised everyone with her response."I sat my mom down and I said, 'Listen, I know you're gonna freak out,'" I remember. "But she understood. She's like, 'You know what? I get it.' I said to her, 'It's not that I'm leaving the church. I'm not leaving the faith. I just need to find someone who speaks it in a way that makes sense for us.'"The Business of ExclusionHere's where Rev. Erin drops a truth bomb that explains everything: exclusion works. From a purely institutional standpoint, drawing hard lines about who's in and who's out is more effective at filling pews than radical inclusion."Black and white, deciding who's in and who's out, actually works better at retaining people," sheadmits with painful honesty. "A lot of people like certainty. They want certainty, they crave it. And when you give them openness and choice, they're like, 'Oh, well then I'm just going to choose to be at home and be a good person.'"It's a devastating insight into why religious institutions resist change even when their own scriptures demand it. Control is profitable. Fear is a business model. And love—real, unconditional, barrier-breaking love—is apparently bad for the bottom line."For butts in seats, control and black and white decision making and hard and fast rules about who's in and who's out actually works better to keep people," she continues. "It's heartbreaking because when people realize what's happening, when people realize that actually God's love goes beyond the black and white... wherever you draw a line, you will always find Jesus on the other side."The Pope's Progressive PerformanceWhen it comes to Pope Leo XIV's mixed messages on LGBTQ+ issues, Rev. Erin sees through the careful choreography of institutional change. The Vatican will bless same-sex couples but condemn the surrogacy many queer families need to build those families. They'll baptize trans people but call their healthcare a grave sin."You can't truly bless what you refuse to understand or allow others to understand," she says with cutting clarity. "Education is one of the most powerful tools we have for dismantling prejudice. If the church truly wants to bless same-sex couples, it also needs to bless their lives, their stories, their children, and the spaces where they are formed."On the Vatican's stance that surrogacy is equivalent to human trafficking while blessing the children born through it: "True pastoral care means journeying with people through the fullness of their lives: their grief, their joy, and their hopes—in this case, to become parents. To bless a couple while condemning the means by which they build a family is not care, it's control."The Language of Love vs. The Reality of HarmRev. Erin reserves her sharpest criticism for the gap between public gestures and private language—like Pope Francis using homophobic slurs in closed-door meetings while publicly meeting with LGBTQ+ activists."Many queer people have experienced the pain of leaders who smile in public but wound in private," she says. "That kind of duplicity damages trust and reinforces harm. Real change happens when both public gestures and private language reflect the same radical love. Anything less is performance, and it's not enough."When I ask whether Leo XIV's approach represents genuine inclusion or just better-branded exclusion, she doesn't hesitate: "I think we're seeing better branding, not real transformation, at least not yet."The Revolutionary Act of Simply BeingAt her former church in Sharon, Rev. Erin ran a 2SLGBTQ+ youth group that became a masterclass in radical acceptance. No programming, no therapy sessions, no attempts to change or fix anyone. Just space, junk food, and permission to exist."I literally just brought junk food and provided a space," she remembers. "And they came in droves and loved it. We had, I think at one point, like 22 kids. Probably 17 of them were trans. And they were so happy and joyful and they loved that space."The teenagers called Rev. Erin and her team their "cosmic mamas." They were wild, joyful, and finally free to be themselves without conditions or caveats. "It wasn't about changing who they are or helping them be who they are. It was letting them be who they are. That's it."This is Rev. Erin's dream scaled up: a world where LGBTQ+ people can exist without intervention, without having to meet requirements or prove their worthiness. "Full inclusion, no stop, just normal."The Sacred OrdinaryMy family's story illuminates what's at stake in these theological battles. My twin daughters, born through surrogacy, have learned to explain their family structure to curious classmates by calling their surrogate "an angel"—language from a children's book I wrote about their conception."She is an angel because she gave me them," I explain to Rev. Erin. When one of my daughters was told she must be adopted because she doesn't have a mom, she confidently corrected: "No, we have an angel."This is what families do when the world tries to shame their existence: we create new languages of love, new mythologies of belonging, new ways to see the sacred in what others call deplorable."The moment I had kids was when my fear, which I've never lived in fear... now I live in fear," I tell her. "Not for me because I don't care about me. It's about them. I want them to have that faith and I want them to have that love, that understanding of love because ultimately I feel that that's what faith should be."The Long FightRev. Erin's work exists within the larger context of a justice movement that's measured progress in decades, not years. She talks about Chris Ambidge, a man in her church who's been advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusion "long before it was safe to be" and still gets up at Synod meetings to say he's been fighting the same fights for 30, 40, 50 years."Every time he gets up to speak about things, he will say, 'I have been speaking about this for 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, and we still have only moved that much,'" she says, illustrating a tiny increment with her fingers.The sobering reality? Even in Canada, which both Rev. Erin and I acknowledge as among the safest places in the world for LGBTQ+ families, the work is far from done. "Better, not best," as Rev. Erin puts it.The Love That Changes EverythingWhen someone leaves the church because of rejection and harm, Rev. Erin doesn't try to lurethem back with promises of institutional change. Instead, she offers something more radical: relationship without conditions."I'm not going to judge you for leaving a place that has harmed you," she tells them. "But I hope you will find other ways to connect with God and to connect with people. It doesn't have to be in a church. God is not limited to a church."Her message to LGBTQ+ people who've been wounded by religion is both validation and invitation: "That's not the experience that God wants you to have about your relationship with God or with your relationship with other people, other Christians."The Vision That SustainsRev. Erin's hope is devastatingly simple: "Absolute, full inclusion, that there's no issue ever and that people can just be normal human beings." Not tolerance. Not acceptance. Not even celebration. Just the radical ordinariness of being human without qualification."I have learned so much from the people in my life who are different from me," she reflects. "If I didn't have people in my life who were different than me, then I think I would be a jerk. I think I would be an isolated, jerky person who is unaware about the nuances of life in this big, wide world that we live in."It's a vision of church—and world—where difference is gift, where the margins become the center, where the line between "us" and "them" dissolves because we finally understand that there is no "them," only "us."Rev. Erin serves at All Saints Anglican Church in King City, Ontario, where radical love isn't just preached—it's practiced. In a world still divided by who deserves God's love, she's building proof that the answer has always been everyone.Visit allsaintskingcity.ca to learn more about a church where safety isn't assumed—it's created.As Rev. Erin reminds us: "Wherever you draw a line, you will always find Jesus on the other side." The question isn't whether God's love is big enough for everyone. The question is whether we are.
.jpeg&w=3840&q=75)
.png&w=3840&q=75)