"Our role is to be a lighthouse, to show people the way."

The King’s University held its first Pride event last week. It wasn’t a wild time. There were information tables. Students from SPEAK, which stands for Sexuality, Pride, and Equality Alliance at King’s, addressed their fellow students at chapel time.

Come June, a group from King’s will march for the first time in the Edmonton Pride Parade.

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That may not sound very radical in 2018. But for the small private Christian university, which first gained national notoriety when it fired lab instructor Delwin Vriend for being gay, it’s a remarkable evolution.

April 2 marks the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Vriend decision, which enshrined equal rights for gay and lesbian Albertans and Canadians. Today, King’s LGBTQ community wants the rest of us to know how much their university has changed since the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.

“I feel like Edmonton has been crapping on King’s ever since Vriend,” says Shylo Rosborough, 20, the co-president of SPEAK. “People need to know how hard we’ve worked towards reconciliation.”

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Rosborough is in his third year of a B.A. in theology and sociology. When I meet him, he’s wearing a prominent wooden crucifix around his neck — and a pink and blue trans awareness bracelet around his wrist. Rosborough didn’t grow up in a religious home. His parents raised him to be agnostic. He didn’t become a Christian until his teens. In fact, he was baptized the same month he came out.

“It was a lot of change,” he grins.

He began his post-secondary studies at the Canadian Lutheran Bible Institute. But Rosborough says he was asked to leave when he told the school he was planning to transition. King’s, though, welcomed him warmly. He started on hormone therapy just as he started classes there. Professors had no issues with using male pronouns to refer to him. Fellow students have been curious, but friendly.

“You would expect King’s to be very against homosexuality, because of the Vriend case,” said Erin Wassing, 21, a fourth-year environmental studies student who identifies as bisexual. “But King’s went forward and it changed. The idea that people would still see this as a place of hatred makes me heartbroken. I have never felt unsafe or unloved at King’s. And I want people to know how loving a place this is.”

It’s been a long, difficult evolution for the non-denominational university, which has deep roots in the conservative Christian Reformed Church dominated by Dutch congregations. The school had just 416 students in 1991 when Vriend was fired. He wasn’t just some anonymous teacher assistant — he was part of a close-knit academic community, one his dismissal ripped asunder.

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Photo by Larry Wong / Edmonton Journal

“It was devastating. The community was just shattered,” said Peter Mahaffy, a chemistry professor at King’s and one of its longest-serving faculty members.

As Vriend’s boss and mentor, Mahaffy appealed personally to the board to reverse its decision. He almost quit himself, in protest. But he decided to stay, and to help King’s change.

“What happened in 1991 was wrong, very wrong. Back then, we were immature as a university. As we’ve matured, we’ve gained the capacity to self-reflect, to be self-critical, to own things that were wrong. Healing and reconciliation have come. We have become more humane, more just. But it’s taken a long time.”

Since 1991, King’s has moved from the downtown to a larger campus in southeast Edmonton. It’s become a full-fledged university. Enrolment has doubled. The school is deeply Christian. But it’s embraced a broader social justice mission. As you walk past faculty offices, you see rainbow triangles on many professors’ doors, signalling that they are queer allies, that their offices are safe spaces.

“Every person is welcome here,” said university president Melanie Humphreys, who took up the post five years ago.

“The board’s decision to fire Delwin Vriend was made in a very different time. It was divisive. It was complicated. We grieve it to this day. But the King’s I know is a different place. ”

Things aren’t simple. Many students come from very socially conservative families. Some were home-schooled before arriving at university. For some, this campus is the first place they’ve met an openly gay person. Certainly, there can be tensions.

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Emma Van Arragon, 21, grew up in the Christian Reformed Church. Her father is a history professor at King’s. Her mother is a university administrator. Still, for the third-year English student, who identifies as a gay woman, coming out at King’s wasn’t easy.

“I was terrified. Even having grown up here, I was just terrified of the students. I’m still closeted to some of them,” she admits.

“The worst part is not knowing where people stand. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells all the time. You get your hopes up that someone is going to be accepting, and then they say something homophobic, and you’re disappointed.”

But Humphreys, Van Arragon said, has been a passionate ally, setting a new tone of tolerance on campus. Van Arragon is now co-president of SPEAK. In fact, she was one of those who addressed the student body during Pride Week.

“You have to connect,” she says.

“Christianity is supposed to be about love and justice, and it just boils my blood to see it used to oppress people. I can be gay and Christian at the same time. It would have been easier, so many times, to make a clean break with the church and move on. But I still do deeply believe in Christianity. I do believe in the message of the Bible.”

“We are trailblazers,” said Olivier Prophete, 24. One of the original members of SPEAK, he graduated from King’s a couple of years ago with a degree in biology and chemistry. He’s coming back next fall, to take an after-degree in education.

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“Our role is to be a lighthouse, to show people the way. For me, King’s is a very respectful space, and someplace I was really able to flourish. We model our behaviour on Christ. But I understand people are still skittish about this. How do we explain ourselves to people who are 75 years old and have a very different idea of what a Christian university should be?”

“I believe it is our Christian mission to bring people along with us,” adds Wassing. “We have to educate them. We don’t want to alienate the church community and just shut down communication.”

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For a university which relies on older, conservative donors, navigating this conversation comes with risks.

“Diversity makes us the whole body of Christ,” said Diana Kyle, the university’s alumni relations manager and one of its few openly gay staff members. “As the body of Christ, we have to be able to disagree well, to grow from our differences, rather than let them divide us.”

Still, LGBTQ staff and students on the campus today know they might not be there without Delwin Vriend’s fight for inclusion and justice.

“We owe a lot to Delwin,” Kyle said. “I can’t imagine how hard this was for him. But I’m forever grateful that I can be part of this community because of him. Often the only thing that people know about King’s is that we’re the school that fired that gay guy. But I’m grateful that he was willing to stand up — so that I could be here.”

“I’m really proud of King’s,” said Rosborough. “I think it’s come a long way. But it has a long way to go.”