Twenty Years of Ordained Ministry: A Retrospective

THIS PAST November – on the feast day of the Reign of Christ – I celebrated twenty years of ordained ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada. The word “celebrated” suggests a party, with good friends sharing good food, raising glasses of champagne as they toast to my honour: “Here’s to another twenty years!”

Posted Date : 2026-02-16 15:25:00

Photo: Ashley Marie Creative Studios

Description: Terence Chandra.

 

By Terence Chandra

THIS PAST November – on the feast day of the Reign of Christ – I celebrated twenty years of ordained ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada. The word “celebrated” suggests a party, with good friends sharing good food, raising glasses of champagne as they toast to my honour: “Here’s to another twenty years!” Caught up, however, in the busyness of ministry and family life, I didn’t organize anything like that.  The most I had time to do was rummage around in my crawlspace in search of an old article from the city section of our local paper – an article reporting on my ordination. (Clearly, it must’ve been a slow news day.)

The clipping in question features a grainy, black-and-white photo of my 26-year-old self, staring blankly off into the future of a vocation which, to be honest, I entered into naively.  The frank, no-nonsense headline simply reads “Fredericton Man Ordained” (a headline which I vastly prefer to “Fredericton Man Taken into Police Custody” or “Fredericton Man Missing”).    

Naive, though, is an appropriate word to describe this “Fredericton Man.” What I was naive about, specifically, was just how secular Canadian culture was becoming and how this rapid secularization was sending the churches (particularly those in mainline denominations) into numeric free fall. I was also naive about the psychological toll that the threatened loss of these churches was having on those who had, over the years, found purpose and belonging there –  particularly seniors who had sacrificed so much to keep their buildings heated and their communities alive. Finally (and most detrimentally of all) I was naive about my own ability to lead such communities through the necessary process of change and adaptation, grief and loss.

Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the first two congregations that I served were profoundly frightened of loss. Just as significantly, they were frightened of the things they might have to let go of in order to forestall or prevent that loss. And so, unwilling to make any big decisions, unwilling to lose their lives in order that they might save it (cf. Mark 8:35), I watched as my church boards agonized instead over the most trivial of changes – Whether or not parishioners should have the option of making donations via e-transfer; whether or not to remove a small row of pews to make room for a play space; or whether or not to replace the chipped cups and saucers in the kitchen with new china. (“Ethel’s grandmother donated that dishware in ’38 – we can’t throw it out!”)

After roughly five years of this, I began to feel what I can only describe as a sense of claustrophobia. It was as if my whole world had been shrunk to the size of a walk-in closet and my daily life reduced to the pointless management of minutiae.  This feeling of mental – indeed spiritual – suffocation was made vividly clear to me in a dream that I had while serving in my second parish.

In my dream, I was touring something like the Smithsonian Museum – a network of sprawling hangars filled with countless technological relics from the modern, industrial age. As I wandered about these legendary but now retired aircrafts and space vessels, I came upon the mock-up of a cockpit module from a 1960s era rocket-ship. I somehow discerned that, if I climbed into this cockpit, I would be treated to a highly realistic simulation of a space launch – a thrilling experience that would be narrated (for some inexplicable reason) by former American president, George W. Bush. Wanting to experience the exhilaration of being rocketed into orbit, I crawled into the confined space of the module, shut the door behind me and pressed the button to activate the simulation. But just as the gears upon which the module was mounted began to turn, just as the high-definition screens that formed the windows began to brighten, the whole machine came to a jerking halt. Hunched in the darkness and silence of this cramped space, I found myself consumed by a growing sense of dread. For I realized (in the horrible logic of nightmares) that the door had somehow been sealed, locking me inside a tiny cockpit that had now become my tomb.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what this dream was all about.  I had entered my priestly vocation expecting it to be a vessel to the stars – a chance to shatter boundaries and do ministry in new and innovating ways. Instead, it had become a kind of tiny prison – a prison fashioned from the fear and grief of my church communities (not to mention my own).   

Around this time, I concluded that my calling to the priesthood had been wrongly discerned and that, for the sake of my wellbeing, I needed to leave the ministry.  But what would I do next? Too weak to dig ditches and too proud to beg, I contemplated going back to school and acquiring new skills – perhaps ending up in the funeral business or non-profit work. Consulting with a job counsellor, I even filled out a lengthy online multiple-choice questionnaire designed to highlight the career that would best suit my interests, personality type and aptitudes. Imagine my irritation when the program spat out the following response: “The survey has indicated your interests are similar to those of people in religious careers.”

In the end, I chose to continue in my priestly vocation, the aforementioned survey being only one of the many factors leading to this decision.  However, I knew I had to do things differently. For one thing, I knew that I could no longer allow the collective grief and fear of a congregation to define the way I served. Secondly, I knew that I had to lead a church in forward advance – out towards a hurting world – and not in small retreats, each meant to conserve resources and protect the congregation.

It was around this time that my wife (also an Anglican priest) and I began to explore the possibility of launching a new and risky ministry. The ministry we dreamt of would be rooted in the urban core of our city – a cluster of neighbourhoods with a high rate of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Set free from traditional parish responsibilities, our hope was to embed ourselves within one of these neighbourhoods as community priests, ministering to those least likely to ever darken the doors of a church. We took our idea to our bishop and, after a full year of prayerful discernment, were given permission to launch a ministry that we call Pennies and Sparrows.

Twelve years later, by the grace of God, we continue in this work – work that is, although difficult, deeply rewarding. Over the years our team (now expanded to five staff) has offered a variety of programs and services to some of the most vulnerable people of our community – the poor, isolated seniors, at-risk youth, immigrants and refugees.

Eventually, Jasmine and I both found our way back to traditional parish ministry. While continuing to run Pennies and Sparrows, we were hired on as priests-in-charge at Stone Church – an Anglican community rooted in the same impoverished neighbourhood within which our outreach ministry currently operates.

Today, we find our work to be immensely satisfying – so satisfying that I believe I have a sense of what the Lord meant when he told his disciples: “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32). That food, as the Lord explains to his perplexed followers, is “to do the will of him that sent me and to complete his work” (John 4:34). In short, work done in holy obedience was what fuelled our Lord and gave him life. By the grace of God, my wife and I believe that we are also doing such work – work that is fulfilling in the literal sense of the word.

But I won’t lie: ordained ministry remains difficult. I continue to work with people who struggle with fear and grief. I myself continue to struggle with fear and grief. But through the work of the Spirit, I’m far less bound by it. The Lord, in his mercy, has opened the door of that suffocating capsule, setting me free to love and to serve in the vast, sun-drenched country that is his vineyard.   TAP   

Terence and his wife Jasmine Chandra both serve as priests-in-charge at Stone Church in Saint John, New Brunswick. They also run Pennies and Sparrows, an organization which ministers to some of the most marginalized people in their community (www.penniesandsparrows.org). They have two children, Sam, 14 and Naomi, 8.

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