Pastor Phil Gagnon serves as the Assistant to the Bishop for Domestic Missions and Life-to-Life Discipleship in the North American Lutheran Church. He resides in St. Albert and was pastor of the St. Albert Evangelical Lutheran Church, St. Albert, Alberta, Canada, for seventeen and a half years. His first parish was in Golden Valley Lutheran in Viking, Alberta. He is happily married to his most beautiful, patient, and mostly correct about everything wife, Patricia and has three children Elise, Elias, and Sophie, each in their twenties.
He has taught (2013) at the Onesimus Nesib Seminary on the topic of exorcism and the occult in Aira, Ethiopia, and has been involved in a number of situations concerning cults in the past and present. He also taught World Religions and New Religious Groups at Canadian Lutheran Bible Institute in Camrose, Alberta for nine years.
Pastor Phil was chair of the counter-cult group, Christian Challenge Ministries for three years while he attended The Kings College in Edmonton, Alberta. Since 1989 he has taught seminars on various new religious groups (cults) in Western Canada, California, and Seoul, South Korea. He has also written a book that was well received on evil and exorcism, from a Lutheran perspective, entitled “Deliver Us From Evil.” Pastor Phil participated in an intensive course on the subject in Rome at the Regina Apostolorum April 2015, written other works on new religious groups, including “A Family’s Guide to the Cults: Insights from the Confessions” and a novel entitled, “Where Evil Grows” based upon a true story from his experiences and conversations with a woman involved in a cult group in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Pastor Phil’s hobbies are art and reading, and once upon a time he earned two black belts in Judo and Yoshin Ryu-Jujutsu. He has always been involved in art from an early age from pencil drawings to pen and ink (pointillism) and has in the last few years especially enjoyed watercolour and acrylics. Self taught, he always seeks out opportunities and people to learn from and last year participated in a master watercolour class with Alvaro Castagnet. He paints for the enjoyment and finds rest and peace, found in creating amidst the at times frantic pace of ministry. You’ll find him when he’s able, in his art room at home listening to 80’s music, a sip of Irish whisky at hand and in the rhythm of brush strokes – his “happy place.”
Most recently in the life of the Church, he was Dean of the Canada Mission District for four years, involved in the creation of the constitution of the NALC – Canada Section, and served on the Board of Regents from its inception six years ago.
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