Marion Karasiuk
My faith and ministry story, and how I came to St. Pete’s by Marion Karasiuk I was born in 1964 in Toronto, but grew up in Vancouver when my dad got a job at UBC as a mathematics professor. I grew up a nominal Catholic going to church and Catholic elementary and high schools. When I went to UBC for engineering, I stopped going to church. In 1986 I took a year out because of an emotional breakdown, then returned, and in 1988 graduated top of my class in Engineering Physics. I took a job in Toronto with IBM where I met my husband, Gary. Gary worked for IBM as a computer programmer and remained with them his whole career. I moved on to work for an aerospace consulting firm. Gary and I were both lapsed Catholics, but we wanted to get married in a church because we both valued something about how we grew up. We went to a Catholic priest who said he would only marry us if we promised to go back to church, so we did. We got married in 1992 and lived in Keswick, north of Toronto. In 1993 our daughter Alexis was born. We had her baptised at the Catholic church we were attending. Shortly after returning to work, I took a new job with a robotics manufacturer in Burlington. Our family moved into Toronto, and we got a daycare space for Alexis in the basement of an Anglican church. We started to attend that church. It turns out it was a very liberal Anglican church, but since we were not believers, we didn’t notice. Five years later when I was pregnant with our son Zachary, I stopped working early. The priest at our church wanted to visit an Alpha course at another church in the neighbourhood and asked if anyone would accompany him. I didn’t know what Alpha was, but I agreed to go for a week or two until my baby was born. From the first session my jaw was on the floor. Even though Christianity had been under my nose all my life, I had never really heard and understood the gospel. Zachary was born after the second week, but I brought him to Alpha at three-days-old and never missed a session. I was totally captivated by the Jesus who beat sin and death by dying on the cross and then rose to life. I started reading a 30-day introduction to the Bible every night when I got up to nurse, and when I finished, I bought myself a Bible and never looked back. On November 28, 1999, our priest gave me the opportunity to tell people at church about Alpha. I told them that Alpha introduced me to the crucified, risen Jesus who is alive!
I didn’t return to working as an engineer. Having spent 35 years mostly ignoring God, I wanted to make up for lost time. I volunteered in my children’s school, started a Bible study among Christian moms at the school, helped lead several Alpha courses at the church where I’d taken it, taught Sunday school in my church, organized a Christian rock concert for youth from various churches in my neighbourhood, organized youth events for the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, and volunteered at a food and clothing bank mission of The Church of the Nazarene in my neighbourhood called The Sharing Place (TSP).
The Sharing Place is where I first got my start preaching in 2002. This ministry intentionally nurtures Christian community for people experiencing life on the margins. I
became a monthly speaker. I also joined a group of volunteers that regularly spoke at worship in the federal women’s prison in nearby Cambridge. After a couple of years the TSP director and his wife who were both pastors told me they thought I was called to ministry.
Meanwhile I was having a crisis of conscience because the biblical definition of marriage was under attack in my local Anglican church, the Toronto Diocese, and the Anglican Church of Canada. In 2004 Gary and I moved to a biblically orthodox Anglican church, but tensions arose there too because I sympathized with Anglicans working toward founding the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC – now the Anglican Diocese in Canada), while my new rector did not. In 2007, the year ANiC launched, I was accepted to the Artizo program to train for preaching. Artizo’s ANiC connection put me further at odds with my rector, so Gary and I moved temporarily to the local Community church, the one where I had taken Alpha. By special arrangement I did my Artizo training at The Sharing Place and the Community church, graduating in 2009. After this I started seminary studies. Bishop Charlie Masters encouraged me to join a group of lay people doing a Bible study with the goal of planting an ANiC church in Toronto. In 2010 he licensed me as a lay preacher in this startup effort, and we came under the sponsorship of St. George’s Burlington. We chose the name Christ The King Anglican Church Toronto (CTK) and on September 26, 2010, as we held our first Sunday afternoon service in a midtown Baptist church, I preached Genesis 1.
Our first part-time rector was a priest from the diocese of Singapore doing a PhD at Wycliffe College, U of T. He encouraged me to get involved in an international student ministry connected with the work of Bishop Stephen Leung. It was downtown near U of T which was not near our church. On September 15, 2013, Bishop Charlie ordained me to the transitional diaconate. By then I had finished a lay certificate in Christian ministry at seminary, but transferred to a master degree program which would be required to become a priest. I got involved in lots of student ministry downtown including leading ESL Bible study, teaching English Communication for Post Docs, organizing Christian students serving during orientation week, and grading Perspectives, a course on global missions.
In 2015 our first fulltime rector joined us. He expressed concern about the ability of the church to grow with an afternoon service in a transit-unfriendly location in midtown. Providentially I met a man downtown opening a tea shop called Crimson Teas with a vision of business as mission. At our first meeting he asked me if I knew of a church who could use his space for worship on Sunday mornings. On April 24, 2016, Christ The King held its first Sunday morning service at Crimson Teas. The church grew quickly and since the space could only hold 50 people, in 2017 we started a second morning service. By early 2020 we had also added an afternoon service. During those years other leaders and honorary clergy joined us, and student ministries of different kinds multiplied.
In some ways it was a relief when covid hit because the pace of ministry had become so intense. Instead of three in-person services on a Sunday we had one Zoom-
based service with Catechism immediately preceding it, and we moved our small groups and midweek meetings and ministries online also. During 16 months of this I was able to return to my stalled seminary studies. I completed my courses including my supervised capstone project entitled “Scriptural Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity: Prosopological Exegesis of Israel’s Scriptures in the New Testament and Early Christian Writings.” At long last my master degree was conferred on me in August 2021.
Coming out of covid Christ The King could not return to Crimson Teas. We got space at Wycliffe College to resume in-person worship Sunday afternoons starting July, 2021. By September our rector announced he was leaving to do a PhD. One of our honorary priests was asked to serve as interim, but he needed support. Having now completed my master's degree I stepped forward to be ordained a priest and serve alongside him. Bishop Charlie, the departing rector, and the interim priest-in-charge were all supportive of this, but it turned out that two other honoraries and a key lay-leader were opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood. They wrote to the bishop and persuaded him not to proceed. I had worked with these three men for years and felt very hurt by this. I took a five-month leave. On returning we had a reconciliation process. I had a nine-month dialogue with one of the men, examining the Scriptures on the topic of women’s ordination.
Meanwhile many things were changing in family life for Gary and I. Gary was retired and wanting to travel in the winter, our children had grown up and moved away from Toronto, and eldercare concerns were developing for my folks in Vancouver. We decided to sell our Toronto home and move to a condo in Vancouver near my folks on the UBC campus. In November 2022 Christ The King church gave us a lovely send off. I did a picture slideshow giving thanks to God for his faithfulness through the 12-year history of the church. I have been back to visit several times since then and was delighted when last year their new rector asked me to preach on Christ The King Sunday for their 14th Anniversary.
In June 2023 Gary and I moved into our condo in Vancouver near UBC. We started attending University Chapel Sunday mornings and I also served as deacon with St. Thomas Mission that met there Sunday evenings. The pastor of UC and rector of St. Thomas Mission was on leave for six months, so I helped out with preaching both Sunday mornings and evenings. When he returned, he was let go from the morning service and he elected to move St. Thomas Mission to another location. I did not want to be in the middle of the resulting tensions, so I asked Bishop Mike Stewart if I could visit some other Vancouver parishes in our diocese and find a new parish home. Bishop Mike suggested that St. Peter’s Fireside might be a good fit. He also made this suggestion to Grady who after listening to one of my sermons online reached out to me. I began visiting St. Pete’s and was officially welcomed to become your deacon at the end of June 2024. It has been a delight to belong to St. Pete’s since then!!
