He did not like being called a fundamentalist. But he was. I actually didn't like him at first. I was participating in one of the Bible studies in my building. I only started attending these Bible studies out of a mixture of curiosity and feeling a little bit of pressure from the fundamentalist Christians running my social housing apartment building. Fundamentalist Minister, who facilitated the BS seemed a little bit ingratiating and I sensed him to be a talented manipulator. I really didn't feel he could be trusted.
I only later learned that he was one of the new ministers in the fundamentalist church I attended for two and a half years. They didn't run my building but the manager was a member there with influence. When they asked to show some of my art in their church, and I consented, I thought to check them out. I have to admit that I was drawn in by the warmth and friendliness. Only later did I learn that they were overwhelmingly right wing conservative homophobic bigots.
Fundy M was going to plant a new church in East Vancouver and he wanted me to help him. I foolishly said yes. We frequently had coffee together and he quickly learned that my views on same sex love and marriage were taking a disturbingly liberal turn. I by that time had come to accept gay marriage as good and necessary and a matter of human rights and good Christian ethics. I had not come to this understanding overnight but through a process of prayerful thought and consideration that took years. Fundy M was not willing to see this, but usually kept quiet about it and even tried to show that he could agree with me up to a point. And of course he was relying on me to help him plant his new church.
He suffered a stroke that held him back as he tried to recover. In the meantime I offered almost all my spare time scouting around in various eastside neighbourhoods looking at houses for sale since as an obligation of his church he was seeking to buy a house in one of those neighbourhoods. They found a place, evidently without my help, and a location for the new church: the borrowed premises of a Russian Baptist church, every bit as rigid and intolerant as Fundy M and his bigoted little sect.
With others from my building I was attending for a while services at this church, on the other side of town. There was in my building all kinds of subtle proselytization going on. Given the imbalance of power between tenants and management and our vulnerability, for them it was really like shooting fish in a barrel.
In the meantime I noticed that I appeared to be the only one in his circle who wasn't really welcome in his home. I was only invited for Thanksgiving dinner there (having no family I generally have nowhere to go on holidays) at the pressure and behest of his wife, and within an hour after dinner he asked me and the other guest (like me, present only for charity) to leave, while closer friends of the family were allowed to stay on. This was the first major death blow in our friendship.
Our discussions about equal rights for gays and same sex marriage became increasingly heated and hostile. When I challenged him to imagine what it might be like if every aspect of his sexual orientation, including the existence of his wife and children, should cause his persecution and rejection by society, as an exercise in empathy about what LBGTQ people have had to suffer for centuries, he dropped me like a live grenade. The following Sunday I paid my final visit in his church. Same sex marriage had just been legalized in Canada and Fundy M decided to preach against it. Midway through his diatribe I walked out and never returned.
I have since run into Fundy M maybe twice in the ten years since the death of our alleged friendship. He will not give me the time of day. Such Christian love, but I really do not miss him and I think I am doing rather well without his friendship.
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