Retiring Pastor Ted Goossen of the Christian Centre Fellowship in Thompson will take many memories south with him when he moves to Saskatoon to be closer to family in August, but one that sticks with him was an encounter with a man who’d attempted suicide that he visited in the psych ward of the Thompson General Hospital.
Goossen had dropped by the hospital to deliver a card from his wife Mary thanking the man for a gift he had purchased for the Goossens. The man was out on a pass at the time Goossen ran into him on the way out of the hospital as the man was coming back.
“He had struggled through faith issues and stuff like that and he had re-committed his life to Christ and I said, can I pray for you?” Goossen recalls. “We just kind of moved off in a corner somewhere. I finished my prayer and then he prayed and he moved me to tears. He thanked God, he says thank you for bringing my new pastor Ted into my life at a very dark period in my life, he said, when I saw the light and you used him to bring light and hope into my life and that for me was a thing I’ll never forget. I think when I look back on my years that’s probably one of those trophies that you sort of look up and say God, there’s just the right touch, one individual that someone might make a difference at least in [the man’s] life.”
That Goossen was able and willing to connect with this man is something he credits to a painful part of his own life, when his youngest son Josh committed suicide.
“He was diagnosed with schizophrenia since 2001,” said Goossen, describing his late son as a brilliant musician who went into decline while the family was living in Winkler after having moved south from Cranberry Portage and Simonhouse Bible Camp. “He did well for a while but then he had to go back and had to be re-admitted. At that point he lost hope.”
Josh Goossen jumped to his death from a building in Winkler. That tragedy, his father feels, gave him the tools to minister more effectively to those with mental illness.
“I said to the psych ward staff one year after being here about three, four years, I find some of my greatest joys have been just coming in to visit those who are struggling with mental health issues and they’ve appreciated me coming in and I just said 10 years before this I would have been petrified.
Following his son’s death, however, Goossen was able to use his own experience to let people know he understands a bit about what they’re going through.
“That in itself just sort of breaks the ice,” Goossen says. “Had we not had that experience with our son, I don’t think I would have been able to minister the way I have been.”
Goossen was born on a farm near Manitou and attended university and seminary in Winnipeg before he and Mary moved to Winkler to run a bible camp. In 1985, the couple moved north for the first time, to Cranberry Portage.
“That was kind of a dual role of pastor of the Grace Church and director of Simonhouse Bible Camp,” says Goossen. “I did that dual thing for 10-and-a-half years until 1996 and then I went full-time with Simonhouse Bible Camp because the camp kept growing and needed the full attention of the camp director so then I went full-time with the camp until 1999.”
After moving back to Winkler and serving as associate pastor at a church for three years, Goossen found the road calling him and began a two-year stint as a long-haul truck driver, during which he defied people’s expectations of what being behind the wheel for hours at a stretch can do to one’s body.
“It was the gym on the road, people always remarked, because I lost 17 pounds took three inches off my waist,” says Goossen, who attributes the slimming effect to the fact that he was driving flatbed trucks. “You’re constantly chaining stuff and tarping. The good part was when you finally got everything loaded down then you had probably a two- or three-day drive to get to where you’re delivering stuff.”
Upon his return from a trip, the conference minister approached Goossen and asked if he would consider going back into the ministry.
“At that point I said, ‘I’m open to having coffee and talking about it,’” Goossen says. “Next thing I know I’m in Chicago, I get a call from Keith Derksen, the moderator of the church here, and he says, ‘I hear you’re coming back into ministry.’ Well, I said I was interested in having coffee. So that’s where it started, the conversation and we came up in February to candidate at the church and submitted an application and the church accepted us so we began Sept. 1 in 2005.”
Goossen had thought when he left Cranberry Portage and Simonhouse that he was done with the north, but says there are things about the northern way of life that attracted him back.
“Thompson has all the amenities of a large city but it’s still a small-town feel to it and that’s one thing that we really felt comfortable with,” Goossen says. “There’s a closeness that comes in terms of people open to talking about you, you talk to your neighbours. We were just amazed at some people [down south] who had lived for years still they didn’t know their neighbours’ names, had never met them. In Cranberry Portage people come to visit us and say, ‘Do you know everybody in this town?’ I said, well, there’s 900 people here, there’s no way I knew them all. I know quite a few of them but it’s just that kind of thing and the same way here in Thompson. It’s got a hometown feel to it. It operates as a city but the relationships are much more open.”
Among the accomplishments he takes pride in having been a part of in Thompson are working through the Thompson Christian Council to get churches of different denominations working together on initiatives like preaching in each other’s churches during services in the week leading up to Easter, a practice that a youth pastor from the U.S. who came to Thompson could hardly believe.
“He came from a Baptist church in North Carolina,” Goossen says. “Where I live, he says, there’s 60 churches from my denomination alone, my branch of Baptist, there’s 60 of us in a 60-mile radius, he says, and none of us work together.”
Goossen said he’d always intended to work until he was 74 and he’s only approaching 67 now but that health concerns of his own – he had lung cancer five years ago and his vocal cords were damaged during surgery, while last year he had six stents put into his heart – and of his wife, who had hip replacement surgery and osteoporosis that leave her with pain and mobility issues, prompted an earlier retirement then planned. His official end date is Aug. 31, which marked the end of 10 years of ministry in Thompson, but his final day of preaching will be Aug. 9 because he has vacation time to use to pack up and move south. He and Mary have two children who live in Saskatchewan and another in Calgary, and 13 grandchildren overall. Goossen, who was the only one of his siblings to remain in Manitoba, will live outside of the province for the first time in his life.
But no matter where he goes, he is known to many who’ve never seen Thompson nor had ever heard of it for his 2009 video of himself and Mary blowing bubbles in -45 Celsius weather that found its way onto the social news and entertainment website Reddit and briefly launched him into viral video superstardom in 2013. The year before, a missionary friend of his from Snow Lake who was serving in Turkey said she saw Goossen in a CNN story about what people in North America could do during a cold snap. That propelled his YouTube video to about 20,000 hits. The next winter, the attention for his antics exploded.
“So everybody’s talking about me [being on Reddit], that was a Friday,” said Goossen, who had no idea what Reddit was at the time. “By Sunday it had half-a-million [hits] and it just blew us away. My daughter phoned me from Calgary, my daughter-in-law. She said, ‘Dad, did you know you’re on CBC page one, your video?’ I said, ‘What?’ I just kind of got catapulted into this kind of notoriety.”
