A dream, a life, and the place where so much began.

It was a dream.

Okay, this one is going to be a tough one, but it’s so important to do, and hopefully it’s healing and cathartic. It’s really a record of history, and it’s also a tribute to really what started it all—to where we find ourselves today.

It was a dream. It was a concept. It consumed a lot of our time, Rosanne and I, in conversation and dreaming, laughing, crying, arguing, agreeing, disagreeing.

It was a concept that, quite honestly, we knew little, if anything, about. We were familiar with the rites-of-passage world, the hatch, match and dispatch world. But to turn it into a life, a career, a business—well, for me, it seemed normal because I love building things, and I love the business world, and why not? Let’s try it.

So we researched, and we looked into it, and we could not see any reason that we couldn’t go forward. Lots of questions regarding legalities. Lots of paradigms that you have to work through because we were both traditional clergy. Can I do this for people who are not part of my congregation? Am I allowed to do this? Will the province say anything? What can I call myself? Can I give myself a title? Can I call myself an officiant, an officiate, a celebrant? Very little existed at that time.

We founded Kettle Creek Weddings in 1998. We set out, and we began to put some stakes in the ground. Now, I look back at them. There are a lot of them in the roadway. Some of them are visible, and some of them are around the corner in a bend that I can’t see because that part of the journey was incredibly hard.

So I will speak of joys, and I will speak of heartaches, because I think that’s real. Matter of fact, I know it is. Life is not void of hard times. But those hard times develop the character and the tenacity and determination of some, and destroy others.

For us, we never gave up.

Found at the crossroads.

2003 was what we would often refer to as our official launch, and it was a trade show in London, Ontario. We had never been to a trade show. Matter of fact, from what we could tell in conversations we had had with others, no officiant ever had. Why would you?

As we were told once by some well-meaning person, “Everyone goes to church. What would they need you for?”

Well, there had already been a shift in culture. Canada was already moving briskly into secularism, and as a result of that, the migration away from the institutional church and traditional clergy was big, huge, enormous—bigger than we ever could have realized.

And we were there at that precise time when people needed us the most because they didn’t go to those who traditionally did this. They did not go to their priest or minister or rabbi, imam, a monk—whatever it might be. They looked for alternatives.

And we were there. We were found at that crossroad. We were available. They really didn’t know who we were, and we weren’t sure who they were, but we kind of navigated this together.

They taught us more than we probably could ever have realized.

That first trade show was a Saturday and a Sunday, and it was in January of 2003. And it was actually just a few days before our daughter, Michaela, was born.

So there we were, Rosanne, nine months pregnant, standing in a booth, trying to explain to the people who walked by—engaged couples, family members, a lot of curious wedding professionals—who would look at our sign that said, “Kettle Creek Weddings, Wedding Ceremony Officiant.” And nobody would have any idea what that meant.

Most actually said they had a venue. They figured we were a venue, and we would kindly and respectfully say, “No, we’re not a venue. We will actually officiate your wedding. We will do the actual ceremony,” were the phrases that we used.

And they would laugh and giggle and go, “What would we need that for?” And then we would have to have a little bit further conversation. Parsing it out and defining it and describing it became quite a task.

We were exasperated after two days. But then there was another trade show, and another one, then another one.

The Wedding Room.

One of the most important decisions we made in the earlier stages of what we did was that we realized we would do very well to be in the very heart of the city of London. We lived 30 minutes south of it in a smaller community, but we knew in order to target the largest numbers, we needed an operation base in the heart of a city that was 360,000 people.

So we found a small room—actually, a vacant closet in an apartment building right behind London City Hall—and we created what we called the Wedding Room.

The manager of the building ended up being the sister of a longtime family friend, and she thought we were crazy. We took out some money. We asked a family member for a loan, and we got the money, and we had to renovate this closet.

We put a little desk in there, and a consultation table, and we put 12 chairs in there, and we set it up with a fireplace and stand, and it was beautiful. We called it the Wedding Room.

We got a little sign, and we stuck it outside right by City Hall, so that if someone was going looking for a marriage licence, they could get married right then if they got it. They would come to us, and City Hall began to send people to us.

In that first year, we officiated 187 weddings.

And it was about money, initially. We had left and had closed the door on years and years and years of traditional ministry. Another difficult and challenging decision.

It’s not that the weddings and funerals or Kettle Creek Weddings were not ministry, because everything is run through the grid and lens of ministry for us. It always has been. It always will be.

It was a shift in ministry definition, and we were okay with that because we are fully aware of the paradigm shift of ministry expressions in secular cultures. We know that.

But that shift meant no income, no money, no government assistance, and it meant that every dollar we made fed us and clothed us and paid for cars and gas and mortgage. We literally prayed, and we put all of our energy into it.

But I’ve got to tell you, I have such incredibly good memories. Maybe I’ve blocked out some of the things that didn’t go that well, but I remember renewed energy and excitement when the phone would ring, because emails really didn’t exist.

We would book somebody, and we would meet them, and we would see them face-to-face, and we would hear their story, and we could hardly wait to get home to each other and hand each other the $50 we received for a deposit so that we could go and buy diapers or milk or groceries.

And the extraordinary thing is we never missed a mortgage payment. We never were in want in those early days. It was a faith journey, and God was faithful, and we worked hard.

And it really paid off. It was powerful.

We went the other way.

The Wedding Room was a great success, but so was the development and growth into the rest of the world besides those who would come to City Hall. Again, the timing was very unique. It was quite incredible.

There were a handful of people who had their name on a list at City Hall. There were three or four people who were in the Yellow Pages of a phone book, if you can remember those days. And everyone identified as clergy or reverend.

And we went the other way, and we used the word officiant.

I’ve got to be honest, it probably was three to four years before it began to become clear in people’s minds.

The very first trade show we ever did in the city of Toronto, the trade show coordinator came by our booth, looked at us, and said, “Nobody will ever need you. Everybody’s already got a priest,” and walked away.

Well, it turns out that wasn’t true, and we booked lots.

The journey was interesting. It was always us, the two of us. The first couple of years, we were able to handle everything on our own. The numbers were small enough.

When we got into that second year, our numbers climbed up to about 350, and it required that we add another person. So we naturally did what we knew to do, and we reached out to people who were already ordained clergy with a registration number in the province, and we asked if they would help.

And they did. They would come alongside us, and if we couldn’t do one, they were able to step in and help out.

We never said no.

Our model was pretty simplistic. Our business mindset was to never say no.

We knew that every encounter mattered, and we knew that every couple mattered, and we wanted to be in everyone’s life. We did not want to live by, “We’re booked.” We wanted to live by, “We are here for you, and we will serve you.”

And we, over all of those years with Kettle Creek Weddings, didn’t say no. We said yes.

Well, that demanded the growth of a team, and perhaps that’s another story. But it is a reality, and it is part of the Kettle Creek Weddings story. And part of that tribute is to just be so grateful for the dozens of people who were in our lives over all these years.

And I mean dozens.

We had a really simple, yet somewhat confusing model for our business, and that was that we felt strongly that to replicate it and grow it across a province of 10 million people required couples just like us in other major cities.

So that’s how we structured our model, with no regrets. We just firmly believed that the couple should do this together—not an individual, not apart from someone else. It could really cause conflicts when they’re away every weekend, but if they’re in this together, their strengths and weaknesses play together, and it worked.

One of the very first couples we ever asked were James and Leanne, and they stepped in and developed an area in Chatham, Ontario. Extraordinary couple. They’ve now gone on and founded their own funeral home, and we are so eternally grateful for them.

And they owned it, and they built it.

Then we had couples in Kitchener and Waterloo, and couples in Burlington and Oakville and Toronto and Durham Region and Prince Edward County. It just grew and grew and grew.

At one point in time, there were well over 100 associates who were able to put their name beside the name Kettle Creek Weddings.

From nothing to something.

Some of the most fond memories that are so important to put down in print or recording for us were that we never stopped talking. We dreamed. We learned.

There were so many things to do. There was a name to choose and a brand to create and colours, and what do you look like, and how do you go forward, and what are wedding colours and what are not? Where do you advertise and where do you not advertise? Who are clients? Who are not clients?

I could literally write an entire book just based upon all of the things that we learned regarding branding.

But all I can say to that is that we were so grateful for the Tims in our life and the Ernas in our life and Impressions Printing in our life, who journeyed with us through this entire evolution from nothing to something.

And it was really quite extraordinary. We created great friendships—amazing friendships—and they would challenge us, and they would grow us and expand us. And we think we did the same for them.

You’ve got to give credit to them. We could not have done this without them.

There was a lady—I never met her—out of Texas, and she, frustratingly enough, worked with me to try to figure out how to build a website because I did not know.

The first quote we were ever given was for over $100,000 that we could finance over 10 years. I still laugh about it.

But you’ve got to understand, this was the beginning stages. Google Search didn’t exist, and emails were just coming in. We were still on dial-up when we started. It was a very interesting time.

Cell phones were limited, with huge antennas. There was no such thing as a Google Calendar. Nothing was in the cloud. Everything was local on a computer and a laptop, and if it died, you lost it all. It happened to us at least once, so we started over.

We had reams and reams of paper everywhere and file boxes, and I guess just on and on it went. But none of that really stood out as aggravating.

The greatest joys, the fondest memories, the greatest tribute I can give was that Kettle Creek Weddings was so much part of the formation of our relationship.

It consumed an enormous amount of our time and energy.

The stories of the day.

Some of my fondest memories were Saturdays. Yeah. The getting up and going. Sometimes it would start on a Friday night with a rehearsal or a wedding.

We would have babysitters arranged. Our daughter was mutually raised by a community, a tribe, a village of extraordinary people—from teenage babysitters to some of the parents of the kids we babysat to Grandma, who came pretty well every other weekend for years and years and years.

Grandma taught Michaela what a cookie was and introduced her to grilled cheese sandwiches and ketchup and all of the things that we tried to protect our wonderful daughter from. Grandma did what grandmas do, and they were joined at the hip.

And we would go off in our cars that were cared for by two guys at Bridgeview Motors. Brothers, actually. There were three of them. And Harley was the mechanic, and Bob was the salesperson.

For well over a dozen years, close to 20 years, they took care of us in ways that one could possibly never imagine. Just recently, we took a trip to St. Thomas, Ontario, just to look Harley in the eyes and tell him how much we appreciated him and thank him.

Again, chapters could be dedicated to them helping us live this journey without question, without reservation—matter of fact, with significant sacrifice on their behalf for our good.

They belong in bold print with capital letters in the Kettle Creek Weddings story and tribute, as do Tim Kershaw and Erna Coffin and all of their artistic flair. All of the associates who worked with us and dared to step into a journey they didn’t understand, with a couple who had no navigation in front of them and no map to guide them.

We used our strengths, and we complemented each other’s weaknesses.

And we would go off on our weekend journeys in separate directions, in cars that were maintained and cared for and provided by these incredible brothers.

One of the greatest joys that still brings a smile to my face is meeting up after to retell, in detail, with both joy and sorrow, the journeys of our day.

It was not uncommon for us to land at the Outback Steakhouse that was in South London, now closed, owned and operated by Barry and Kelly. Kelly, an extraordinary photographer who became a dear, dear friend.

We would eat the same meal that we shared, and we would sit, usually with a glass of wine, and tell the stories of the day. The brides, the grooms, the venues.

Smiles crossed our faces often, talking about the professionals who were now becoming friends. The photographers you would see over and over and over again—the Ewens and the Briannas and the Jens, the Mary Lynns. The DJs we fell in love with—Rob Aitken in particular from Music Central, a dear friend.

There would be hugs. There would be stories shared. There would be shared ambition and commitment to providing an extraordinary day.

We were blessed to meet some of the most extraordinary people, and that was just in our city.

We would sit, Rosanne and I, over steak and baked potato and salad, and we would reminisce. When you go to a restaurant on a regular basis, you also meet some servers, and they became good friends, and they would share in our stories.

I love those days. I miss those days.

The burden and responsibility.

Doing so many weddings, the friends grew, the associates grew, Kettle Creek Weddings grew—and so did the burden and responsibility.

I guess that’s why sometimes entrepreneurs put a hold on it. Part of what we were doing got away from us. Some of it was motivated by economics, and part of it by opportunity, and part of it by, in me, an insatiable drive to build and create.

It worked. It was working. I was in shock.

We would build a website and create it, and it would take off. Things were different back then.

Out of this whole wedding thing grew an entire funeral world, and it exploded. But Kettle Creek Weddings was the spark that landed—that fanned that flame.

Out of this came celebrant training and Certified Celebrants Association. Out of that came a new Life Celebration, where we sat down and created the entire thing from scratch—brand new, ours, our own.

Programs grew, and websites were developed, and team members expanded. Exhaustion and fatigue and burnout were some of the fallout.

The course correction.

2013 was probably one of the worst years. From an impacted, infected tooth from a bad root canal to pneumonia that almost killed me, from the unfortunate consequences of an entire bag of Tamiflu given to me to try to balance out the pneumonia that ruined my gut flora—I was three months laid up.

Diagnosed with burnout and adrenal fatigue. Muscle mass was depleting quickly because I was unable to keep protein in my body. I found myself eating baby carrots just simply because that was the only thing I could stomach.

We persevered, I guess. We did our best during that time. You cross your fingers, you pray, and you ask God for healing, and you push forward.

It was not long after that that I realized how incredibly sick I really was, and that something needed to change.

So we made a very important course correction in our model. We decided we could no longer expand regional offices.

We hosted a meeting in November of 2013, me still trying to recover, trying to navigate through these things. It was just a few months after the pneumonia, which was in February of the same year.

At that point, we had a meeting with everyone who was part of our organization. We had called all the regional-office people, and there were a lot of them, and we informed them that we would be shutting down the regional-office model and giving them total autonomy to go and do whatever they wanted to do.

They could use the Kettle Creek Weddings brand, or they could choose to go on their own. Every single one of them chose the brand, and there were a lot of them.

We set an annual brand fee, and thankfully, by the grace of God, that fee gave us enough money to navigate the next year and a half.

At the very same time, we had gone through the process of applying in the province of Ontario to become a registered religious body. That had come through just about the same time that we were able to host this meeting, and that was the course correction we made in our lives.

We were no longer training people for Kettle Creek Weddings. We were training people through our not-for-profit charity called Celebrating Life Ministries, which was now a recognized religious body.

That meant that for Rosanne and me, the brand was on life support. We had to step away. We were no longer doing events because I was so sick.

We shifted our energy to training and equipping, empowering and authorizing people. A membership model was created of autonomous, independent officiants in the province of Ontario, no longer on a model of royalties and regions.

The consequence of that was good and bad. It was less work. It was less demanding. We weren’t required to be out every weekend or every day to a funeral or a wedding.

I had, prior to that, been officiating anywhere from 200 to 250 weddings a year. At one funeral home alone, I had done 125 funerals in one year.

We were travelling all over the province. We were in a relationship with two corporate funeral companies, and we were providing celebrants for families who did not have clergy.

It really took its toll.

Kettle Creek Weddings slowly, over the next few months and years, began to lose its edge. We hung on, mostly because we were so proud of what we created. Why would we ever give it up?

It’s time to say thank you.

And that’s what brings me to this recording.

It’s time to say thank you. Even if this never gets published—and maybe I hope it does.

Rosanne, who is right here with me, and I want to say thank you to everyone who helped us do what we could never have dreamed could have been done.

All of the people.

And it’s time to say it’s over. It’s done. It’s time to end it.

So let’s mark today, Saturday, August 8, 2026, at 3:14 in the afternoon. I, together with Rosanne, say it’s over.

Not possible without all those people in our lives, and certainly completely impossible without the goodness and grace of God.

There were hard years.

I got sicker, and I almost died from hyponatremia. I would like to say that making the transition and the shift and all of those things restored my health, but it got worse.

I know that first night I was admitted to the hospital with 102 sodium, I had a visit from God. And he placed me behind him and said that I’m safe. I’m his. I’m protected from anything or anyone that wanted to hurt me.

And I’m here today. It’s 2026. It has been 11 years since that injury, that sickness, that sodium crash. I’ve recovered a lot.

We’ve made some transitions, and yet we’ve hung onto a hope and a dream that honestly has no future. But we will never forget the memories.

I’d like to tell you that all of those years from 2003 until today were rainbows and unicorns. But I’ve got to tell you, they weren’t.

We lost everything financially once. We were betrayed, lied about, lied to, stolen from.

There’s a biblical verse, a story told by King David, that mourns how hard it is to be hurt by those with whom you once shared fellowship.

I wish it wasn’t in my story, but it is. It’s in both of our stories.

Some of it was from friends, close friends. Some of it was from family. But I guess the entrepreneurial journey is never without pain and loss.

But we felt it a lot.

There was actually an instance when one individual went so far as to claim that he had come up with the idea of Kettle Creek Weddings. It was his idea. Many, many years after it had already been established and there was a historical record online, he claimed, “It’s his. It’s mine.”

Just a small taste of the kinds of stuff we faced over the years.

Do I have regrets? No.

Am I angry? Sometimes.

Am I heartbroken? Yes.

Do I want to ever say it’s over? Never.

I am tenacious. I don’t quit.

But this is right to do now.

A hopeful future.

And the best way to do it is to just say thank you.

It has shaped us and formed us. It has changed us. It has aged us.

But we will find ourselves some days just overwhelmed with gratefulness.

I don’t want to live in a grateful past. I want to live in a hopeful future. I want new great memories.

We pray that God gives us freedom in a way we’ve never experienced. That he would place us exactly where we need to be. That we would forgive what needs to be forgiven, be healed for what we need to be healed from, and be empowered and filled in a brand new way, in Jesus’ name.

So to all and everyone, from family and friends to a long, long list of incredible people who we still call friends today: thank you.

Thank you, God.

Thank you for creating us and designing us and giving us this privilege. We pray and hope that we have stewarded well what you entrusted to us.

Thanks.