James Ferry (born 1952) is a Canadian Anglican priest who became a central figure in the struggle of LGBTQ+ inclusion within the church due to his sexual orientation as a gay man.
The issues surrounding Ferry arose in the early 1990s when he was publicly defrocked by the Anglican church after being outed by Archbishop Terence Finlay, who ordered him to end his relationship with his partner.
Ferry wrote a memoir titled In the Courts of the Lord: A Gay Minister’s Story in response to this, detailing the spiritual, personal, and professional hardships caused by the church’s position on homosexuality, and how he has overcome those struggles in years following.
Ferry was appointed as the honorary assistant at the parish of St. Peter’s Church in Erindale, where he also married his husband, Jun, in 2017.
Ferry worked for the Ontario Advocacy Commission, and then at the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care's Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office for 20 years before retiring in 2019.
[2] [3] A bishop’s court is a practice that was introduced in the Tudor period to persecute and subdue heretics and other people that the church deemed sinners.
The results of these court proceedings sent Ferry into nearly a decade of grieving where he viewed God as an "abusive father" who was allowing his son to be prosecuted out of love.