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A frank conversation with Whistler Community Church’s outgoing Pastor Jon Pasiuk

Pasiuk discusses the church’s new building, religious intolerance, and the challenges of leading a congregation in a ‘post-Christian’ era
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Pastor Jon Pasiuk and his family are leaving the Whistler Community Church after eight years to return to their home church in Abbotsford.

Pastor Jon Pasiuk opened his penultimate sermon to the faithful gathered at the Whistler Community Church last Sunday with a question that many Christians find themselves wrestling with these days.

“Today we’re talking about the values of this church that speak to our relationship with the world. How is the relationship going? If I’m honest, I’d have to say, not very well,” Pasiuk said in his sermon, which he shared with Pique. “None of us here face imprisonment or death for the act of getting baptized, but I get the impression that our existence and our presence isn’t exactly celebrated in Canada or in Whistler. People are for the most part friendly and polite, but whenever I tell people I’m a pastor, people respond as if I’ve just told them I lead a cult, and I’m sure people have all kinds of reasons for that.”

For a community that has been largely areligious throughout its history, Whistler’s Christian community has been getting lots of attention of late—including in the pages of Pique—stemming from a rift at the resort’s only Catholic church, Our Lady of the Mountains, over its plans to build a new, $5-million church facility and its association with an ultra-conservative, U.S.-based Catholic Traditionalist group, the Napa Institute.

The Mennonite Brethren Whistler Community Church, meanwhile, has come under scrutiny as well, after longtime Pique columnist G.D. Maxwell questioned whether the church should continue to receive a municipal tax exemption when its rental policy prohibits community groups from using church property to promote same-sex life partnerships and marriage, as well as abortion rights, both “totally legal activities,” Maxwell wrote (Aug. 25, “And the beat goes on…).

But rather than meet what he sees as a growing indifference—or, in some cases, outright hostility—to Christianity by either fighting back, retreating from society, or assimilating into the wider culture, Pasiuk gave his congregation a fourth option.

“Our response to that can’t be hostility,” he said in a follow-up interview. “We’re not at war with this community. We have to love this community. So that’s what we try to focus on.”

Pique sat down with Pasiuk this week as he and his family prepare to leave the community he has ministered in since 2014 to return to his hometown church in Abbotsford. Vancouver native David Gibson will continue on as executive pastor, until the church finds its new lead pastor.* 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How will you look back on your eight years in Whistler?

Jon Pasiuk: We look back with tremendous gratitude and love for this church and this community. One of the things is that change is a part of living in Whistler, and we’ve had to be on the receiving end of the ‘I’m leaving’ conversation more times than I can remember. And one of the things that we recognized when we came was that in order to succeed and thrive in ministry and as a church, when people transition out, you bless them, you send them off, pray for them, and you really want to help set them up for success the best you can. Part of that is that you can’t harden your heart, harden yourself against bringing new people into your life.

 

Do you find people crave that sense of connection in a town where they may not have family supports?

Yes, and that’s part of the Whistler scene. People usually don’t have family support here. Sometimes that’s intentional and they’re wanting to define themselves. They’re wanting to discover their identity. Sometimes that’s running away from God. And then they quickly realize, ‘Actually, that’s not going to give me a life.’ Sometimes people come from a very religious or a very Christian upbringing, and they do the opposite. They say, ‘I want nothing to do with that.’ And so, we just want to be ready to receive and support. Because it’s not an easy town to thrive in. It’s like “Hotel California”—“This could be heaven or this could be hell.”

 

How significant was last year’s opening of the new church building to the congregation and wider Christian community in Whistler?

It’s really a huge blessing for us to finally have a home of our own. The plan was never to stay in Myrtle Philip School for 20-plus years. So, really, it’s an answer to prayer. It’s a dream of our community that’s now been realized. And we’re so thankful for it. That building has been home for my kids as much as their house has been. Part of the challenge is that this is a very new thing for us. It’s so huge. How do we properly utilize it to serve our needs as a congregation and be a blessing to the community? And there’s some learning that comes with that, some growing pains.

 

In your sermon, you said the “congregation is not going to feel truly at home in this community or any other community.” Do you feel like the church hasn’t been welcomed by Whistler?

Part of that sense of not [feeling] at home is that this is a very post-Christian culture. We are less than one per cent of the community. When I tell people I’m a pastor that usually provokes some kind of reaction. It can be outright hostility; it can be suspicion. Sometimes it’s just indifference. But we do feel like we’re on the outside.

 

Do you think that uphill battle is specific to Whistler or is it indicative of the wider culture?

Part of the challenge with the culture in general, not specific to Whistler, is you have this combination of the historical sins of Christendom: residential school, persecution of other groups, all those kinds of horrendous things. That’s legit. And then you have the way that, say, the media, the movie industry, television, etc., have taken that and created caricatures, or strawmen, from that, and people react against that. It’s not that they know Christians necessarily who have been jerks, but they saw Christians being jerks on TV or on a Netflix show that’s fictional. Or they look at late-night comedy and the way that the religious right is constantly lambasted, and they think that’s what we all represent, that caricature that’s being mocked. Not to say that we’re innocent, because we are the first to admit we are broken people and often don’t live consistently with the teachings of Jesus. But there is that sense that it’s OK to trash Christians, it’s OK to say things about us that you would not say about any other group.

 

Don’t you feel like some of that is in response to the real-world impact certain Christian beliefs have had? We’ve just seen millions of American women have their access to abortion taken away from them because of a Christian belief that has now been codified in U.S. law.

I will not deny there are two different visions of the good here. What I find is people are reacting to the strawman. Take the abortion debate. What they’re reacting to is the idea of men trying to control women’s bodies. That’s not what we’re about. The truth is for women who are contemplating the choice, making the choice or have made the choice [to have an abortion], our posture has to be one of care and mercy. The difference is we recognize the inherent worth and rights of the human being. If [the unborn] is a person, that person has rights. You have the right to do whatever you want with your body, but your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins.

 

I’d argue a woman choosing to have an abortion is not a punch to your face.

It’s not me, but another human being who has an inherent right to exist.

 

I guess that’s where this debate lies, doesn’t it?

That’s not where the debate is, right? We [as a society] don’t want to have that conversation. We want to talk about, ‘You are controlling our bodies,’ which usually involves accusing [Christians] of sexism and misogyny. No, we actually are not. When you look at countries where sex selective abortion is a big thing, men outnumber women by, say, 13 to 10. Is that a win for women? I think there are a lot of conversations we’re not having. So, part of the reason why we feel we don’t belong is we’re told, ‘Hey, if you’re coming from a religious perspective, you have to shut up. Pay your taxes, but shut up.’

 

But, as a church, you get a tax break, don’t you?

OK, Max said that [in his last column], but we only get a $1,500 permissive tax break per year …

If the municipality wants to ... make us pay the $1,500, that’s not a big deal. It’s an interesting place where we are in Canada, where there’s this move towards enforcing ideological conformity and using access to government programs and services as a tool for that.

The question is, ‘OK, where do we draw the line?’ I assume if someone gives money to an organization that represents something hostile to us, they still get a tax deduction. That is actually just part of living in a democratic society, which is that we have a lot of different voices in the conversation, and it is a conversation where we have different visions of the good and the bad. But when we start using these legislative mechanisms to enforce what is OK to think and what’s not OK to think, that’s tricky.

 

Is there anything else you think people should know?

One of the things that I think a lot of people don’t know about our tradition—we’re Mennonite Brethren—is we have a very strong peacemaking tradition, sometimes going all the way into very rigid pacifism. But generally, just saying violence is contrary to the nature of Christians that were conquering in the name of Jesus [during the Thirty Years War of 1618-’48]. While that was happening in Europe, our group emerged as kind of a counterculture. ‘We’re not doing that. We’re going to be different.’ And so those are our values.

*An earlier version of this article stated that David Gibson would be taking over as pastor at the church, based on comments from outgoing Pastor Jon Pasiuk. In fact, Gibson will continue as executive pastor, a role he began last year, until a full-time lead pastor is found. The search is expected to take several months.