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230 pages; July 2020
$19.95 CAD
ISBN  978-1-927496-17-6
High-quality paperback , with black-and-white photographs

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Just published!

50 Years of Ministry
​by Michael J. Pitts
with a foreword by John Simons


A half-century of ministry took Anglican priest Michael J. Pitts from England to Russia and Mongolia, Finland, Sweden, and France, and then to Canada and the far northern reaches of Quebec. He has served sailors and dock workers in ports and onboard ships, traveled by snowmobile to minister to remote communities, and, as Dean of Montreal's Christ Church Cathedral, led a busy inner-city parish through tumultuous years of change in the Anglican Church at large.

In the memoir which begins this book, Michael looks back over a multi-colored life in active ministry. And in the forward-looking collection of writings which follow, he looks toward the great challenges facing the institutional Church and Christianity itself in an increasingly secularized world. The Church's purpose and relevance have always been central to him, as well as faith for the intelligent, educated, contemporary person. "The question I wanted to ask," he writes, "was how we could live and articulate Christian faith in a society educated and socialized in a scientific and secular culture in which religion was marginalized."

In his fifty years of ministry, Michael Pitts has always sought to find a pathway of faith that neither negates the truths of science nor the Christian teachings which contain keys to human harmony with all people and with our planet. In the series of thoughtful and questioning writings presented in this book, he explores these difficult topics with intelligence, unflinching honesty, and clarity that will resonate with laypeople and clergy alike.
...we need to search, first within ourselves, and then within our communities, our churches, our societies and nations for the roots and the sources of the violence which now stands over us as a major threat to our humanity and to the whole life support system of planet earth." -- Michael Pitts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael J. Pitts was born in 1944 into a middle-class family in Bradford, an industrial city in the north of England. As a schoolboy he became interested in classics and ancient history, and during a school trip to the Holy Land, in the Arab world and the wider sphere of Islam and the refugee situation around the world. He read theology at Oxford and attended seminary at Queen’s College at Birmingham, which he chose for its urban, rather than monastic, setting. At the time of his ordination, he had two life objectives: to find places of ministry where he would be in touch with those at the margins of society, and to find an expression of faith which made sense in the context of the hard and human sciences which continued to fascinate him. These goals were lived out through working near seafarers, factory workers, and the urban homeless, and in his continual reading and preaching about the intersection of faith with scientific knowledge, myth and story, and human responsibility. In 1988, the Pitts family moved with their three children to Canada when Michael's wife, Kyllikki, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, took an appointment in Montreal. Three years later, in 1991, Michael was made Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, where he served for the next eighteen years, taking a leading role in advocating for the full inclusion of GLBTQ2S persons in the church and in ordained ministry. After retirement as Dean, he served the Diocese of Quebec for another five years in pastoral ministry to isolated anglophone fishing villages in the north, often traveling by small planes, boats, helicopters and sometimes all-terrain vehicles or skidoos. At the age of seventy he retired, taking occasional invitations to preach, and devoting himself to study, writing, and travel. He and Kyllikki now live in St. Lambert, Quebec.