‘Like a slap in the face’

Member leaves Summerside church after ANTI-LGBTQ+ post on social media

“We’re supposed to preach love and kindness towards one another, and that’s the farthest thing from it in my eyes.”

Stephen Macinnis

A Summerside church is coming under fire from members of the wider community for a seminar it held in June featuring two speakers who regularly advocate against homosexuality.

Summerside Christian Church scheduled a discussion with Pastor Kevin Cavanaugh and Wilna Van Beek, who runs God Gazers ministry.

The event poster on the church’s social media page said the seminar was to “offer sound and practical advice for specific actions parents and grandparents can take to continue to help protect their children from what’s happening during pride month”.

That didn’t sit well with church member Stephen Macinnis. He said he won’t be attending services at Summerside Christian Church anymore. Macinnis came out as bisexual two years ago. He also quit drinking 10 months ago and said belonging to the church was a key part of his sobriety.

“The church was always my safe place to go,” he said. “But realizing that they view individuals as myself and others in the community that way, it’s like a slap in the face. We’re supposed to preach love and kindness towards one another, and that’s the farthest thing from it in my eyes.”

Macinnis said he was going to attend the most recent Sunday service wearing a T-shirt that read: “LGBTQ+ or strait, Jesus loves all”, but decided not to.

“Just due to the fact that there are people who go to church for the right reasons, and I didn’t want to disrupt the service,” he said.

Macinnis said he used to look forward to Sunday mornings, but he now feels as if he’s lost his best friend.

“There was a lot of people in the church that I enjoy, … there was a camaraderie.”

No one from the Summerside Christian Church responded to phone or email messages sent by Saltwire Network.

The church’s social media post read: “Christian parents and grandparents everywhere are asking what they can possibly do as they watch their children and grandchildren

“Growing up in the church or being exposed to these things may suppress somebody who’s already queer.”

Lucky Fusca

inundated with information that contradicts the core of their faith and belief.”

FACE THE FEAR

Lucky Fusca, co-chair of Pride P.E.I., shared a personal story of their path out of a religious upbringing as a non-binary person when they connected with Saltwire Network about the issue on July 4.

“Growing up in the church or being exposed to these things may suppress somebody who’s already queer. It’s not going to change the fact that they are queer, it’s just going to hurt their lives, for potentially an indefinite period of time until they come to those realizations and find a place of love.”

Fusca grew up in Ontario where, even as a young child, gender definitions didn’t make much sense to them, but in the early ’90s, there wasn’t a lot of language available to help them or their family understand what they were experiencing. Fusca then attended a Catholic high school.

“It was very heavily a religious school,” they said. “Looking at things now that I’m on the other side, I can say with a lot of confidence that growing up in that kind of environment very much delayed my coming out process. There was a lot of internalized hate and internalized shame that was built based on my experience there.”