Student Profiles

Introducing Chauncey Knegt

My name is Chauncey (“Shaun”) Knegt, and I graduated from the M.Div. program at CRTS in 2019. In June of 2019 I underwent an ecclesiastical examination and was declared a Candidate for the Ministry of the Word. My desire in presenting myself for call to the churches was that I might in short order be called into full-time, long-term ordained ministry in a local church. “In his heart a man plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps” (Prov. 16:9). Time has shown us that it was not the Lord’s will that I should enter ordained ministry immediately after graduation from seminary, but that he wanted me to learn life-lessons that cannot really be learned from seminary textbooks. Certainly, my experiences over these last couple years (including the flooding of our home in the Fraser Valley in November 2021) have reminded us that our God and Father is in control of all things, and that he has a plan for our lives that we could not have predicted.

During my first year after graduation, I spent most Sundays preaching for churches in Southern Ontario. For the month of November I supplied the pulpit for Abbotsford CanRC in British Columbia. For the Summer of 2020 I went back to what I had done every Summer since beginning university: landscaping. Then, during that Summer I received an invitation to come preach and teach catechism for nine months for Yarrow CanRC in British Columbia while their pastor was on medical leave. So, at the end of August, 2020, my wife Emily and I packed up all our earthly belongings into a U-Haul truck and made the move to the Fraser Valley.

It has now been over a year and a half since we moved to the Fraser Valley, and the original nine months of service in Yarrow will have extended to nine months plus a year come June of 2022, when my ‘contract’ here will come to an end. I am grateful for the experience I could gain over this past year-and-a-half by serving the Yarrow CanRC, and for the evidence of growth in my development as a preacher and teacher of the Word. The Yarrow congregation have been patient and gracious with me, and this has gone a long way in encouraging my growth. At the same time, my desire to enter full-time ordained ministry has only increased through this time, and we continue to pray that the Lord will open a door for this in his time and in his way. Didn’t our Lord Jesus say, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”? And so we “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:38).

*Updated April 2022