Kyler McAlister and I first became friends in the fall of 2024 after I recruited him to serve on Trinity Western University’s student prayer team. It did not take me long to discover that he was much more than the Bible-bashing Reformed bro I had initially believed him to be.1 Instead, there was a real, tender affection for Jesus which clearly undergirded his approach to ministry and to life in general.
Fast forward to the present day and not only are we still friends but we are also roommates.
While I am thoroughly enjoying my experience of being out of school and thus blissfully unaccountable to professors and their looming deadlines, Kyler went straight from graduating with his Bachelor of Science in Biology last spring to enrolling in ACTS Seminaries’ Master of Divinity — also located on TWU’s campus — this fall.
His aptitude and affinity for the ministry have always been evident to those who came to know and love the TWU iteration of him. But they would have come as an absolute shock to anyone who knew older versions of Kyler.
When I was a kid, people would be like, “Well what do you want to do when you’re older?” And all I knew was that I didn’t want to be a pastor.
In fact, he now believes that part of his “initial draw” to studying the sciences in university was the fact that it was “as far away from being in ministry as I could go.”
So what changed?
In short, everything changed for Kyler around this time three years ago when, to borrow his phrase, “I saw my sin for the first time.”
He was attending a church in Hamilton, Ontario at the time by the name of James North Baptist Church. Despite growing up a pastor’s kid in British Columbia — first in Chilliwack and then in Williams Lake — Kyler met more people at James North whose “faith was more than Sunday mornings and youth group” than he felt like he had ever met up until that point. Faced with this unmistakably potent witness to the beauty of Christ and His Gospel, Kyler was left feeling “shaken.”
I didn’t understand. It seemed like people had intimacy with God and it wasn’t something that I knew.
While this paradigm shift ultimately went on to bear its good fruit in his life, its first effect was to seriously upset him. “I was angry,” he explains, “with the fact that it felt like God was willing to be close to everybody else but wasn’t willing to be real to me.”
His anger finally reached its breaking point on a December evening in 2022 when he found himself crying out to God in his apartment. “I remember I was just so mad,” he says looking back on that moment.
It was in the very midst of his groaning and grumbling that the words “Psalm 13” began to resonate in his mind. That was all well and good, except for the fact that he had no earthly clue what that chapter of Scripture contained—or indeed why it had so mysteriously appeared in his thoughts. So, naturally, he opened up his Bible to find out what the deal was. And boy did he find out.
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the LORD
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
All of a sudden, this child of God who had come to feel invisible before Him finally experienced the joy of being thoroughly seen by the Father. “I broke down and wept on the floor of my basement apartment,” he remembers, “and the Lord absolutely comforted me.” This had been the sweetest of spiritual encounters, and it changed everything.
That was the first time where I was like, “Okay, Lord, you can have me.”
Kyler maintains that the Holy Spirit had never stopped working in his life. But his Psalm 13 experience was the landmark event which broke down his walls and prompted him to truly surrender his life to God. The fruits of this decision were immediately apparent—chief among which was that most elusive of virtues: humility.
2023 had started off with a bang, but it was not the fun kind (as good as it ultimately proved to be). Kyler’s girlfriend of eighteen months had chosen New Year’s Day to end their relationship via video chat. His immediate reaction was to determine that he “needed to stay in Ontario” and continue attending Redeemer University lest a potential return to Williams Lake be interpreted as a weak response to the breakup.
Returning to Williams Lake in and of itself was hardly an appetizing prospect. Having left the small city at the end of his high school career as his way of “running away” from the life he had lived there for the better part of a decade, coming back carried with it the risk of signalling that everything he had sought to build for himself in Ontario had “failed and [fallen] apart.”
Then it hit him.
I decided that that had a lot less pride in it and that was what I chose.
His decision-making up until that point had centred itself around one pillar: to protect his ego by preserving his image. But his newly regenerated heart could not bear to reason in such an un-Christian way. “I had to let people in Ontario think that I left just because of this girl,” he concluded. And so to British Columbia he returned.
His spring would go on to be characterized by an insatiable hunger for God and His word which manifested itself in relentless prayer and daily engagement with Scripture. His parents were among many who took notice of this impressive transformation.
On more than one occasion, he actually received prophetic words from people who claimed that they had identified a divine call to be a pastor on his life. Unsure about the accuracy of these prophecies, Kyler approached his parents with the matter only to discover that they themselves had been sensing the same calling over his life.
After a summer spent in the woods planting trees and taking in God’s beautiful creation, Kyler then headed to Trinity Western University knowing that formal ministry training awaited him on the other side of his hard-earned science degree.
When I asked him to comment on what the first few months of his M-Div have been like, he pointed out that while studying is certainly an “act of worship,” it is also merely the “tip of the iceberg.”
The goal is not just to learn how to pastor well. The goal is to know Christ deeper, to abide in Him.
“I can study and I can go through seminary and I can spend years in Job 38-41,” he told me while on a brain break from writing his latest paper, “but if I’m not seeking to be in step with the Spirit and in relationship with Christ, it’s in vain.”
The last thing Kyler wants is to be the kind of pastor who knows the Scriptures like the back of his hand but whose actual relationship with God is nothing but a distant memory. “You can know a lot about Him without knowing Him,” he stresses.
His yearning to be close to the heart of Jesus is admirable. It is also infectious, and one of the main reasons why I am both blessed to live with him and certain that he will make an excellent pastor one day.
Theologically, he is much closer to what one might call a Bapticostal
I really appreciated this piece. It’s honest without being performative, and it doesn’t rush the story toward a neat conclusion. The way Kyler’s faith unfolds through resistance, lament, and humility feels true to how formation actually happens. I especially loved how Psalm 13 becomes a turning point not through answers, but through permission to be honest with God. This was thoughtful, pastoral, and deeply human. Thank you for sharing it.