Gary Paterson

Gary Paterson is a Former Moderator of the United Church of Canada from 2012 to 2015. He was the first openly gay person to take the post since the church was formed in 1925 and the first in the world to lead a major Christian denomination. He earned two degrees in English literature and became a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia. Paterson studied theology in Boston and the Vancouver School of Theology before being ordained by the United Church of Canada in 1977. He served as a minister at several rural and urban churches, became a staff member of the British Columbia Conference of the United Church, and then served as a minister at three churches in Vancouver: Ryerson United Church, First United Church, and St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church.

Gary Paterson is a retired United Church minister who calls Vancouver home, but who has a love affair with Bethlehem Spiritual Centre here in Nanaimo. He has spent time working in the Downtown Eastside, and on the more affluent westside of Vancouver, but for the last twenty years or so he has been a minister at St Andrew’s-Wesley United Church, the downtown “cathedralesque” United Church. It was here that he experienced “Jazz Vespers, ” which has been happening at St. Andrew’s-Wesley on Sunday afternoons for over thirty years now – a time when Jazz and the Spirit dance together, a mixture of great music and short spiritual reflections (which inevitably include some poetry). Gary is a lover of jazz and of words (sort of a “closet poet”), and loves the opportunity to bring them together. He’s been partnered for 42 years with Tim Stevenson (an NDP MLA in the late nineties, and a Vancouver City Councillor for 16 years). And together Gary and Tim have helped raise their three daughters and four grandchildren…. And they’ve listened to a lot of music.