Jordan Cantwell
|
The Right Reverend Jordan Cantwell |
|
|---|---|
| Moderator of the United Church of Canada | |
| Church | United Church of Canada |
| Elected | August 13, 2015 |
| Predecessor | Gary Paterson |
| Orders | |
| Ordination | 2010 |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1967 (age 49–50) New York |
| Spouse | Laura Fouhse |
| Alma mater | St. Andrew's College |
Jordan Cantwell (born 1967) is the Moderator of the United Church of Canada. She was ordained as a minister of the United Church in 2010, and was elected to the position of Moderator at the 42nd General Council of the church in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador in 2015.
Cantwell was born in New York in 1967; when she was in grade two, the family moved to the Canadian Prairies. Her mother being Methodist and her father Roman Catholic, she was raised in the Anglican church, but left it when she was in her twenties. Cantwell became involved in social justice issues such as the anti-apartheid movement of the late 1980s, and in 1993, the United Church of Canada sent her to South Africa as an international observer through the World Council of Churches.
Cantwell joined the United Church in the 1990s, and began to work for the Centre for Christian Studies in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she met her future spouse, Laura Fouhse, a diaconal minister of the United Church. She also worked also worked as a staff associate – a part-time lay minister – at Augustine United Church in Winnipeg. She was one of the co-plaintiffs in Vogel v Canada, the court case which ultimately legalized same-sex marriage in Manitoba.
In 2006, at the age of 39, Cantwell made the decision to become an ordained minister of the United Church; however, she would need to first earn a Master of Divinity degree. She and her family subsequently moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan so that she could attend St. Andrew’s College. Upon graduation in 2010, she was ordained and was settled as a "three-quarters time" minister of Delisle-Vanscoy United Church in Delisle, Saskatchewan. (The small rural congregation could only afford the equivalent of three-quarters of a full-time position.)
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