When you ask the Rev. Dr. Dean Jobin-Bevans to describe his ministry style as a musical genre, he answers with a simple truth: “Ministry isn’t a solo,” he says. “It’s not a concerto. I’m not a soloist. It’s symphonic — all these moving parts, all these people with their own strengths and limitations. And the work is to bring them together, not dominate them.” He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to. A lifetime in music, a lifetime in the Church, and a lifetime in leadership are contained in those few lines.
Born in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Jobin-Bevans grew up Catholic, sensed a call to the priesthood in his teens, and followed the thread that appeared clearest at the time: music. He studied at the University of Toronto and then at McGill, where he completed both his master’s and doctoral degrees in choral performance. His early years unfolded among choirs, conservatories, and liturgical music across multiple traditions. The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul in Montreal, the McGill Conservatory—these were among the musical worlds he inhabited before moving to Thunder Bay in 2005 to join the Department of Music at Lakehead University.
Throughout those years, Jobin-Bevans never stepped away from ministry. “Not once,” he says. Anglican congregations, Presbyterian choirs, United Church services, Catholic liturgies, even High Holy Day singing in synagogue—his schedule made room for them all.
His academic life expanded with equal fullness: Chorusmaster of the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra; founding artistic director of the Kanteletar Chamber Choir; Chair of Music at Lakehead; later Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities; finally Principal of the Orillia campus. Scholarship, leadership, and community life came naturally to him, and none of it distanced him from the Church. If anything, these roles created the conditions for a call to ordained ministry to deepen quietly in the background.
This fall, Jobin-Bevans returned to St. Paul’s, Thunder Bay, a place he has known for more than fifteen years — as Incumbent. He first served there as Director of Music beginning in 2010, stepping back only when academic duties intensified. Returning now, with ordained ministry before him, he finds himself leaning into the parish’s longstanding motto: Ambassadors for Christ. “It’s a reminder of who we are,” he says, “and of how we’re called to show up.”
He talks about Scripture the way a conductor talks about a score, attentive to tone, language, and the relationship between parts. The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, is one he returns to readily. His doctoral work on Benjamin Britten’s Cantata Misericordia, a musical setting of that parable, shaped not only his scholarship but his theology. “The text and the music speak to each other,” he says. “Compassion expressed in multiple languages, scriptural, musical. It stays with you.”
Jobin-Bevans’s understanding of pastoral life has been shaped most profoundly by people—those who trusted him when he was learning, who allowed him to accompany them through loss, illness, and transition, who showed him what ministry looks like outside a classroom. “Placements help,” he says, “but they’re not the same as being in the thick of it.” The generosity and patience of parishioners, he notes, is something he never takes for granted.
When he speaks about the places that have shaped him, his answers are neither dramatic nor sentimental. Twin Lakes on St. Joseph Island comes first: a simple A-frame cottage tucked under cedar, mornings on the dock, water still and close. “I never tire of it,” he says. His academic leaves at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and his upcoming period at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, come next. Settings where music, theology, and daily chapel life rise and fall together in a rhythm feel natural to him. And then, with a small smile, he mentions a pilgrimage he still hopes to make through the wilds of northwestern Wales, once he convinces “a respectable English friend” to go with him.
Asked who outside the Church has shaped him most, Jobin-Bevans speaks of his late mother, Onalee Jobin-Bevans, with utter clarity. After his father’s sudden death, she moved in with him, and they shared a home for a decade—through moves between Thunder Bay and Orillia, through the strains and graces of everyday life. “She was always devoted to church, community, everything,” he says. “Her way of being in the world shaped me.” She died just over a year ago, but she knew her eldest son was on a path to ordained ministry. “She would be proud,” he says.
Despite a career filled with serious musical and academic work, Jobin-Bevans is generous with the lighter details of his life. He is a cat person. His comfort meal after a long Sunday is a roast chicken with all the trimmings. He practices Morning Prayer faithfully but loves the atmosphere of candlelit compline. A musical preference that might surprise people? “Duran Duran,” he says, amused. “And all of that ’80s new wave.”
Now, as he approaches ordination to the priesthood on December 6, the step feels less like a beginning and more like a natural continuation, the next movement in a long score he has been sketching out for years. Teaching, conducting, pastoral care, theological study, community leadership, his longstanding familiarity with St. Paul’s—none of it sits in isolation. Each part carries something of the others.
The symphonic image he offered at the start lingers at the end as well, not because he intends it as a theme but because it fits the way he lives: many voices, many gifts, many movements, held together with a steady hand, a collaborative heart, and a deep respect for the gifts and talents of others.