Packed to the brim, the church was bustling and busy. Members of the choir rushed about, their robes brushing past pews that were full from end to end.
Soon, a hush began to fall over the congregation within St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Shawville. The choir, a combination of singers from this location and their sister church in Renfrew, gathered at the back of the aisle.
The procession was quick but different than what the attendees were used to, and that’s what made the celebration most special. Following behind the choir was a combination of over two dozen reverends, travelling from across the river, up from Ottawa and all around the Western Quebec region to take part in the ceremony.
Rounding out the procession was a special sight for church goers from around the Pontiac. The Bishop of Ottawa, the Right Reverend John H. Chapman, joined the Archdeacon of West Quebec, the Venerable Mavis Brownlee, for the ordination of Reverend Timothy Gerard Kehoe on Jan. 18.

For Kehoe, the buildup to this one service was years – most of his life, actually – in the making.
“It probably started at age 15. I had an experience through a Baptist friend, watching a Billy Graham crusade on television,” said Kehoe. “To my great surprise I ended up having, what people call, a conversionary experience, a real personal experience with Christ and faith came alive. Up till then I had been a very cultural Christian, you know, you go to church because that’s what your parents tell you to do.”
He said that he was on-track to becoming a priest in the Catholic church as a young man, when he met someone that would derail his career choice. A woman named Susan was in the back row of a mass he was attending.
Their meeting would make his decision an obvious one, and a Catholic priesthood would no longer workout for what he wanted in life. Still, he would always feel a calling to his faith.
“It was a challenging process of trying to sort things through, they call it discernment, and I knew I felt so alive with her, there was no way that my path going forward wouldn’t be with her,” said Kehoe. “That meant closing the door to ordained ministry as a priest so there was always a sense that that was the right decision, but there was a road not taken.”
From there, his spiritual journey with spiritualty continued in a new form, as he built and raised a family with his wife. Still, Kehoe would have this sense of something tugging at his shirt sleeve, leaving him wondering how best he can serve God.
One day, while attending a prayer and meditation retreat with his wife, they met a priest from an Anglican church in Ottawa. Getting along well, that priest invited them to join the community of parishioners at St. Luke’s Anglican Church, on Somerset Street in Chinatown. Curious, they decided to give it a chance.
“We had a sense, my wife and I, that we were kind of led here, opposed to having angrily left anywhere, it was pure grace,” he said.
Kehoe said that he found a serious calling with this community, the values and the leadership of this particular parish.
“It was less a question of leaving something to join something else than finding that my path led into an Anglican parish … that I found myself arriving in a community that pretty much was everything I had been hoping a church might be,” he said. “It was very Catholic in the sense of the liturgy of the word and the Eucharist and all the sacraments … It was a very inclusive community where some of the issues for me as a Roman Catholic were a real challenge.”
He continued to say that such issues as married men or women being excluded from the ordained ministry were difficulties that conflicted with modern culture.
“There were people in that particular parish [St. Luke’s] that were gay that had not felt welcome in various other church experiences and you know, the byline at that parish is all are welcome and then in italics, without exception, and they really meant it,” he said.
On top of this greater feeling of inclusion, Kehoe was impressed by the openness with management, business and leadership, including approving the budget.
“In the Anglican context, they have an annual general meeting of the parish called a vestry, where everybody gets to ask questions of the leadership,” he said.
Still, one of the biggest draws to the Anglican church for Kehoe was the sense of social justice outreach that the church commits to in a community.
“In the basement, St. Luke’s has a service that has become a ministry of the diocese called St. Luke’s Table and they feed 200 meals a day to homeless folks or people at risk of homelessness in that surrounding neighbourhood,” said Kehoe. “They offer a real welcome for people to come and be listened to, sing karaoke, play card games, get literacy training, addiction counselling support and a whole host of things.”
“I thought, this is starting to add up to the kind of church I was always longing for and I had kind of grown a little frustrated with my previous church context,” he said.
This led Kehoe to one conclusion, his journey within a role of spiritual leadership didn’t have to be over. In fact, it was just beginning.
“I began to realize that this door that was closed was not firmly locked, it was actually just slightly ajar and started to open again,” said Kehoe. “I began to wonder, maybe this might be possible.”
From there, Kehoe began working within the diocese, various committees and eventually met the bishop and was incredibly impressed with the leadership, saying that he had felt like he had arrived at home.
When an interest in leadership and priesthood is shown, a stage of discernment takes place, or the practice of self-guided reflection on what an individual wants and is called to within their life, whether it be marriage through to career choices.
In time, he worked with a few ministers to work on this path of discernment, asking him challenging questions, praying with him and getting to understand his own path. These priests then wrote a letter to the Bishop, recommending him for the next step, where he met with the Postulancy Panel who ask more challenging questions, explaining different paths that were open to working within the church. Eventually, they also gave their positive opinion to the Bishop.
In June, Kehoe found out from the Bishop that he would become a deacon in September, leading to stints in parishes where he was monitored by both the community and other priests.
“It’s a really amazing process, to be honest, it’s a bit daunting to go through. Sometimes along the way you go, ‘Who, me? Who am I kidding?’” said Kehoe. “You really welcome being encouraged by others … it’s a reciprocal process in many ways.”
It wasn’t just Kehoe’s devotion and understanding of his
faith that led him to approval and success in this journey,

though, but his career as deputy chief executive officer with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities connects ideally with the church’s role in community outreach and aspirations for change.
Kehoe explained that the church is always looking for renewal and is in a process of doing so with the Bishop’s region.
Rather than looking to constantly draw in new members to the parishes, they’re looking to expand how they help and interact with people in and outside of the church.
“A lot of what I do is with organizational effectiveness, to route organizational change, it’s about planning, it’s about building collaborative team approaches to our work,” he said. “So, I think there was something seen as relevant in that experience, I mean that alone wasn’t enough for a priestly role, but if you’re going to be a priest, bring your life experience, your professional experience to bear on the way that we’ll go about doing this.”
Which led to where he was last Thursday, kneeling in front of the Bishop, as over 220 people stared on for his ordination.
“I felt pretty calm, surprisingly calm. I had spent the better part of a day and a half with my wife Susan in a quiet, sort of meditative preparation to stay in the moment … I found that I felt so graceful, like, ‘Wow, how did I get here, this feels so right and so good,’” said Kehoe, of his thoughts while kneeling at the front of the congregation.
People came from different spots within the diocese including Ottawa, Renfrew and all over the Pontiac – with the mayor of Kitchener, Ont. believed to be the furthest traveller – as the event was a rare occurrence to take place in Shawville.
“It was really a celebration of community … I’m a small part of that and I hope to be able to make a small congregation as we go forward together,” said Kehoe.
Going forward, the congregation can expect Kehoe to spend at least the next two years within the Parish of Renfrew-Pontiac as the assistant curate. He celebrated his first Eucharist on Sunday, Jan. 21, at Holy Trinity Church in Radford before returning to St. Paul’s to celebrate the Eucharist there, too.