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, Story, and Creative Work
My first published books grew directly from ministry. No Room at the Inn: An Advent Call to Justice considers the nativity story through questions of poverty, displacement, power, hospitality, and justice. Wilderness & Wonder: A Lenten Guide to Dismantling and Reimagining accompanies readers through Lent, exploring disruption, grief, inherited beliefs, and the possibility of change.
My current major project is Faith in the Dismantling, a gentle nonfiction guidebook weaving pastoral reflection and research with original fictional lives. It explores inherited religion, cultural expectations, authority, and belonging without requiring readers to return to church or rebuild faith. I am arranging interviews to inform the work and will focus on developing it during my January–March 2027 sabbatical.
Other projects bring together my interests in ministry, performance, and technology. Small Budget. Big Story. is a practical video-storytelling guide for churches, nonprofits, advocates, and community groups working with limited resources. Liturgy of Coming Undone brings Scripture monologues and embodied worship resources into conversation with the seasons of Lent and Easter.
Further theological projects are taking shape around questions of power and collective responsibility: The Non-Binary God, Traitor to the Empire: Confessions of a Recovering Patriarch, and Individual Homicide: How “Me First” Destroyed “Us All.” These are longer-horizon explorations, not promises of imminent publication.
Fiction and Other Stories
My fiction moves through very different worlds, but keeps returning to belonging, memory, complicated loyalties, and the families people build. These projects are at different stages: some have substantial drafts or detailed outlines; others are waiting for their turn.
The “When She…” Series, beginning with When She Said My Name, follows Julia and Sophia through a lifetime of sapphic love, family, change, and choosing one another. The Broken Crucible Series follows a struggling rock band through the early-1990s American Midwest, where a disappearance draws them into a larger and increasingly dangerous mystery.
Tinker & Trinkets takes a prairie-born young man to an antique and repair shop in mid-1990s Digby, Nova Scotia, where lost things, old loyalties, and an unusual machine complicate his search for belonging. The sea herself is one of its characters. Shards of Grace, set in Chatham, explores an unexpected family formed by a young man, his small half-sister, and an elderly landlord.
The Other Side of Mercy is an intergenerational literary novel about an estranged mother’s dementia, an urgent care crisis, inherited burdens, and the far-reaching consequences of love, prejudice, and ordinary kindness. Across three decades, seemingly unrelated lives gradually converge.
You can explore the published books and projects taking shape on the Books page.
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.