It has a sense of community, a sense of strength – a resolve to get the job done. And if Wil Porat has his way, Slave Lake will become known as a community that removed the barriers that too often divide mankind.
“I see it, I feel it, I smell it,” says the new pastor for St. Peter’s Ecumenical church in this community.
He’s been here off and on for several months – and was recently appointed as the full time interim pastor for the three-denomination church.
Pastor Porat’s evangelical education and training are toward the Lutheran leg of that triangle – which he insists really includes four facets – Anglican, Lutheran, United – “and a rich variety of a number of Christians.
“We are honouring our traditions and serving, through community our unity in Christ.”
Born and raised in a farming community near Duff, Saskatchewan – that little community that lies southeast of Regina, the new pastor took his training at Concordia College in Edmonton, and a similar Concordia training facility in Springfield, Illinois.
But some of his earliest religious teachings came via “Sunday school by mail – which I loved,” he says.
“Every week we’d get a package (in the mail) and every week we’d (complete lessons and) send it back.” But there was that other, though subtler tie, he added, when “my father whistled all the hymns.”
Married with four grown children, the new pastor won’t say how long he’s been in the profession. Interviewed last week, he said his daughter was within days of delivering the pastor’s first grandchild.
What he will admit, however, is that he’s served in the three Prairie provinces – Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta – with a very short stint in the Kimberley-Cranbrook area of British Columbia.
But he’s not all business either. Over the years he’s become an accomplished finishing carpenter – a hobby that the pastor insists helps keep his brain, body and soul intact.
“I need to be able to go to my shop – and make a cradle – or re-finish a piano. Otherwise, I’m not a contented guy.”
Here just a few short months, the pastor has already become a ‘regular’ at Vanderwell Heritage Place senior’s lodge, as well as showing up at a number of community venues – as well as ministering to the St. Peter’s community.
But he had just one footprint to leave in this community, it’d be the one responsible for removing the barriers that separate one religion from the next.
“I want to be part of a world that doesn’t have borders” segregating one from the other, he says.
And more importantly, the new pastor says he wants to contribute further by “helping others explore the richness” of a community that exists as one.

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