Sensus Divinitatis

Since this was posted years ago, dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct by pastoral staff have been registered at The Meeting House, including the criminal charge of sexual assault with Cavey as the perpetrator, now handled by the Ontario court system in 2022 and into 2023. This radically changes the context of a post like this, and you ought to read my more up-to-date posts, including the plethora of articles written in the mainstream Canadian news and especially Christian Courier.

Dr. Elmer Thiessen just uploaded a detailed review of my book The Subversive Evangelical here. He’s friendly, but still does a critical read–both of my book and its subject, Bruxy Cavey, and his church, The Meeting House.

One window into my book is some of the photos I either took myself or took as screenshots from their publicly available videos. Just as a teaser.

There is much more to say about The Meeting House and Bruxy Cavey on the Canadian religious landscape. My book suggests his church reveals a lot about a dominant Canadian culture that stigmatizes evangelicals; how some evangelicals respond reflexively and winsomely to this; and how religion–especially Christian faith–can be fun, silly, ironic, playful–and still be “serious” religion. This last point I call the “serious, strict and sombre fallacy” of religion–that joyful or playful religion is suspect by scholars as being superficial or secularized and not “real religion.”

My larger quest is to understand how leadership charisma works, and I argue that it is a joint production, a communal endeavour, not just an individual trait. It is a drama that takes a whole troupe to create and maintain. You might say it takes a village to raise a charismatic leader. Nevertheless, Cavey is still the star of the show, the central character, and so when in late 2021 it was revealed that he was accused of sexual misconduct, the entire show was in jeopardy. He was asked to resign in March 2022 after an investigation concluded he was in a sexual relationship that constituted an “abuse of his power and authority as a member of the clergy” and which amounted to sexual harassment. Others said that its best summarized as “clergy sexual abuse.”

My next book with co-author Angela Bick focuses on the deconstruction of (evangelical) faith from a Canadian perspective. Cavey is not the focus, as we give primacy to the voice of hurt and disillusioned Christians. It will be published through New Leaf Press.