I’m Gregory Simpson: a minister, writer, speaker, musician, creator, and lifelong collector of stories.
Since 2018, I have served as the minister of St. Andrew’s United Church in Chatham, Ontario. I was ordained in the United Church of Canada in 2024. My work includes preaching, teaching, pastoral care, community leadership, public speaking, and helping people explore the deeper questions that shape their lives.
My approach to faith begins with curiosity. I am interested in what happens when we examine scripture within its historical and literary settings, listen to voices that have often been pushed to the margins, and release interpretations that have caused harm. I draw from progressive Christian thought, historical scholarship, liberation theology, queer theology, womanist theology, and the wisdom people carry from their own lives.
I believe faith should help us tell the truth, share bread, protect vulnerable people, and build communities where people can belong. Much of my ministry centres on grace, inclusion, grief, change, spiritual deconstruction, and the search for meaning during uncertain times.
Along with my congregational work, I speak and create in several settings. I share sermons, devotional reflections, biblical commentary, and short-form videos online. I have also worked in radio, workshops, community gatherings, and regional church leadership. Whether I am speaking from a pulpit, recording a video, leading a meeting, or sitting with someone through grief, I am interested in honest conversation that makes room for complexity.
A Winding Path into Ministry
Ministry was not my original career plan.
I spent about fourteen years working in software development, with a focus on websites and online applications. My clients included insurance companies, health-care organizations, and small businesses. That work taught me how to listen carefully, understand complicated systems, solve problems, and translate technical ideas into language people can use.
Those skills continue to shape my ministry and creative work. I still enjoy building things, learning new technology, producing audio and video, designing systems, and working behind the scenes to make an idea possible.
My path toward ministry began through community, music, and the stage. After moving back to southwestern Ontario, I became part of Calvary United Church in Rodney. Members of the congregation recognized gifts in me that I was still learning to recognize in myself. An invitation to lead a summer worship service eventually grew into regular preaching across Elgin and Middlesex.
I entered the United Church’s Designated Lay Ministry program in 2012 and graduated in 2016. My education combined intensive study, supervised ministry, online learning, and years of practical experience. I served at Calvary until 2018, when I accepted the call to St. Andrew’s in Chatham.
Theatre, Music, and Making Things Together
Long before I preached regularly, amateur theatre gave me a place to explore storytelling, performance, collaboration, and the peculiar energy of creating something with a group of people.
I performed with Ridgeplayers and West Elgin Dramatics Society. Amateur theatre taught me to respect every part of a production: the people on stage, the crew backstage, the builders, musicians, costumers, technicians, and volunteers who make the whole thing possible. It also helped me become comfortable speaking before a crowd and responding when live events take an unexpected turn.
Music has followed a similar path through my life. I have played and sung in church, in theatre productions, and with the bands The Five Guys and A String and a Prayer. I play several instruments with varying degrees of competence and enthusiasm, including piano, guitar, violin, and dobro.
I remain happiest when creativity becomes collaborative: a service woven together by many voices, a performance taking shape during rehearsal, a recording coming together piece by piece, or a practical problem solved with whatever tools happen to be nearby.
Writing About Faith
My first published books grew directly from ministry.
No Room at the Inn: An Advent Call to Justice is a devotional guide for the Advent and Christmas seasons. It considers the familiar nativity story through questions of poverty, displacement, power, hospitality, and justice.
Wilderness & Wonder: A Lenten Guide to Dismantling and Reimagining accompanies readers through Lent. It explores wilderness as a place of disruption, discovery, grief, and transformation, with space to examine inherited beliefs and imagine healthier ways of living faithfully.
My current major project is Faith in the Dismantling. It is being written as a guide and companion for people exploring deep spiritual questions who may never become part of Sunday morning worship or enter a church building. It grows from my interest in spiritual deconstruction, historical scholarship, and the search for forms of faith that remain honest, life-giving, and spacious enough for difficult questions.
Fiction and Other Stories
I also write fiction. The projects are quite different from one another, though each is concerned with human connection, the stories people carry, and the truths that surface when familiar lives begin to change.
When She Said My Name is a slow-burning sapphic romance centred on Julia and Sophia, two women whose relationship develops across differences in age and life experience. Their story may become the beginning of a longer series following the life they build together.
Broken Crucible is a grittier mystery project involving an American rock band travelling through the Midwest in the early 1990s. Music, damaged loyalties, suspicious deaths, and long-buried secrets draw the characters into a mystery that becomes larger and more dangerous as it unfolds.
I am also developing a quieter, character-driven story set in Digby, Nova Scotia. It follows people whose lives meet along the coast, where memory, community, loss, and renewal move with the tides. The sea herself is one of the story’s characters: beautiful, restless, generous, and never entirely safe.
Home, Family, and Life Behind the Scenes
I am married to Brianna, who owns and leads Ascension Dance Studio here in Chatham. Her work brings together teaching, artistry, leadership, and the daily realities of running a local business.
I love helping with the technical and behind-the-scenes parts of studio life. Depending on the day, that can involve sound, video, lighting, sets, websites, spreadsheets, equipment repairs, recital logistics, or finding an improvised solution shortly before the curtain opens. Dance may be Brianna’s calling, though the studio has become an important part of my life as well.
I am also the proud father of three adult children, each at a different stage of post-secondary education and each finding their own direction. Watching them grow into thoughtful, capable, and distinct people is one of the great joys of my life. I am deeply proud of who they are and of the work they are doing to discover what comes next.
When I have unclaimed time, I am usually reading, writing, making music, working with audio or video equipment, building something, repairing something, or disappearing into a technical project that became much more complicated than expected.
All these parts of my life connect through a love of stories, people, questions, and creative work. This website is where those threads meet.