I first met Ashley Galvin in the fall of 2021 when we were both serving on Trinity Western University’s student prayer team. It was shortly after that, during one of our prayer team’s weekly meetings, that I first came to really respect and relate to her.

She alluded during that meeting to her fear of misleading others through potentially erroneous teachings about God and the Bible. It was abundantly clear even then that she took her positions of spiritual influence both on TWU’s prayer team and at her church incredibly seriously. What I did not realize at the time was how much her fears had been shaped by pain and, as she puts it, “capital-T trauma.”

Growing up mostly non-Christian, she started going to church with her father in the fourth grade shortly after her parents’ divorce. This led her to become increasingly involved in the church’s preteen and teen ministries throughout the subsequent years. Her time at Keats Camp the summer before she entered the eighth grade, for example, was so meaningful to her young walk with the Lord that it culminated in her receiving a Bible that she would then go on to read voraciously upon returning home to her native North Vancouver.

She spent another three weeks at Keats the following summer and was baptized a matter of months later. I scrolled all the way down to the second of her 213 Instagram posts to discover how she conceived of her budding faith at the time of her baptism:

My name is Ashley Galvin and I want to be baptized because I believe that Jesus Christ is God and I know that I can trust him… I grew up always believing in God but never really having a relationship with him… In the summer of 2014, I discovered Keats camps. I loved it so much that I have gone every summer since then… One night the speaker was doing a walk through prayer and she told us to visualize how Jesus was in our hardest time. I remember so clearly visualizing me being upset over the divorce and Jesus having his arm around me… Even if I am scared or worried or struggling, I know that Jesus gives me strength during those times, and that I can trust him to give me courage.

Ashley’s love affair with the Scriptures only intensified following her baptism. She would read the Bible every single day. Her knowledge was limited, to be sure — after all, she was not yet armed with the BA in Biblical Studies that she now holds — but in her own words, she “just knew that it was good and comforting” and that she needed it.

She graduated high school with her childlike zeal and innocence still intact and headed into a gap year program in Hawaii with an organization by the name of Surfing the Nations. Similar to YWAM (Youth With a Mission), STN specializes in outreach trips designed to spread the Gospel through humanitarian work.

Unfortunately, however, Ashley witnessed leaders trade in faithfulness to Scripture in exchange for quick bursts of validation as they carried out their ministries. Frighteningly, Ashley caught herself falling into that same pattern. For instance, she references a sermon she gave in front of 80 people on the topic of “God-sized dreams” which, in hindsight, had rested on the flimsiest of biblical foundations.

She came back to Canada thoroughly disillusioned vis-à-vis Christian authority. In addition to the loose handling of Scripture she witnessed at STN, she had also been rattled by myriad other red flags — from the breaking of fellowship over racial politics and an us-versus-them attitude towards staff members who dared transition away from the organization to hints of financial manipulation and exploitation of well-meaning brothers and sisters in Christ. It was a lot for her relatively young faith to take. In fact, she strongly believes that she was well on the path towards deconstruction by the time she landed back in Vancouver.

But God.

In Ashley’s words, “Praise God that He put Nate [Wiebe] in my life because I don’t know if I’d be a Christian without Nate.” Nate was one of the pastors at her home church when she came home from the US, and quickly turned into a significant mentor in her life. Not only did he equip her with tools with which to process what she had experienced at STN whilst still maintaining her faith in God, but he also platformed and encouraged her into opportunities to develop her teaching gift in the local church. Her newly rediscovered passion for the Scriptures combined with a strong desire to counteract the abuses she had witnessed during her gap year prompted her to apply for TWU’s Biblical Studies program.

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Her relationship with Scripture has continued to ebb and flow since she became a Biblical Studies student and, as of six months ago, a Biblical Studies graduate. When I asked her about her disposition towards her Biblical Studies courses as a freshman at TWU, she described first and second-year Ashley as “so stoked” about all her classes — including the 300 and 400 level ones she was enrolled in as a sophomore.

She recalls a particular moment when New Testament professor Dr. Kent Clarke was teaching on the righteousness and grace of God in the book of Romans, prompting her to step outside the classroom and weep because of the overwhelming kindness of God. She would not stop talking to anyone who would listen about how powerfully the Lord had met her in the classroom that day.

Somewhere around her third year, however, things began to take a slightly different turn. Ashley’s old STN wounds had not yet completely healed and her relationship with the Church was suffering as a direct result of that. She was never anything but appreciative of her TWU professors, but she struggled greatly when it came to trusting pastors and other church leaders.

Her zest for the academic pursuit of God was also somewhat waning — a fact which was not helped by the fact that more and more of her classes were concerned with the “makeup of the Bible instead of theology.” All of a sudden, the living word of God did not feel so alive anymore.

Ashley’s mom was shocked when she recently found out that reading the Bible was not a breeze for her daughter the way that it once had been.

“What? You struggle with that too?” she remarked. “I thought it was just me who thought the Bible could be so boring.”

To be clear, Ashley still reads her Bible everyday. But when her Bible reading plan has her going through 2 Kings like it currently does, reading can be a grind.

“I love this dearly, but I struggle with it a lot,” she explains.

Ironically, this sentiment resembles her feelings about the Church circa spring 2024 when she took the New Testament canon course at TWU with Dr. Craig Allert. Throughout the class, Ashley “learned how much the Lord worked with His people and chose His people and how the Church actually is just so beautiful.”

It was towards the end of that semester that she visited Emmaus Road Anglican Church for the first time. She attended ERA’s Maundy Thursday service and thought: “This is where I’m planted. This is it.” She went back a day later for the Good Friday service and the day after that for the Holy Saturday service, and once again the next day for Easter Sunday. She fell in love with pretty well everything about the church — from its community to its liturgical style of worship.

Eighteen months later, she can confidently say that God has “fully restored, healed and redeemed” her church wounds and capital-T trauma. What is more, she credits Emmaus Road and the Anglican Way as the tools which the Lord used to effectuate her present reality. “I have never felt so free in my entire life,” she raves, “and a big part of that is because of my church community.”

Part of the fruit that has come from this newfound freedom is that where her fear of teaching the wrong thing once acted as a crippling weight, her perspective has now “loosened” such that she is no longer afraid of proclaiming the truth of God’s word. The fear of messing up has given way to boldness and confidence in God’s ability to cover her when she falls short. I, for one, cannot wait for December 14^th when she is set to preach at Emmaus Road for the first time.

Testimony Tuesday with Ashley Galvin