He Studied a Black Church in Canada. Now, He’s The Pastor

It sounds like a Lifetime movie plot: a seasoned Black minister trades the pulpit of a big-city American megachurch to lead a congregation of fewer than 200 souls on Canada’s rocky Atlantic coast — a historic place he’d studied for an academic paper nearly a decade earlier.

Ask the minister in question, the Rev. Alfred “Al” Bailey, and he sounds like he can scarcely believe it himself. He acknowledges he never dreamed he would trade majority-Black Baltimore, his spiritual home, for life in smaller, overwhelmingly white Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

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“No, there was not that at all,” he said, laughing.

But God, Bailey discovered, had already drawn the map.

Bailey is the new leader of New Horizons Baptist Church, a historic congregation founded in 1832 by a Black man who escaped slavery in Virginia and settled in a place that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Yet Bailey’s unlikely path to New Horizons is more than a story about a Baltimore preacher taking a job across the U.S.-Canada border in a city whose Black population is less than 5%. It is a journey that connects generations of Black migration, faith, and freedom—from enslaved people who fled the United States for Canada to a 21st-century pastor following some of those same routes in search of history, purpose, and, ultimately, a calling. 

Past as Prologue

Eight years before New Horizons asked him to become its pastor, Bailey had spent a month studying the congregation and the African Nova Scotian community around it, then wrote a 200-page doctoral dissertation on how Canadian churches could strengthen their leadership. He had no idea he was effectively writing a manual for his future self. 

Now Bailey is drawing on that research — and his years in one of Baltimore’s largest Black churches — to lead a historic congregation wrestling with a familiar challenge: how to honor a remarkable past while building a church for the future.

“God was like, ‘Now tell me you don’t know these people,’” he said, recalling his deliberations about whether to accept the job offer. “Well, I kind of know the people because I had to write a 200-page paper on these people.”

New Hope was founded when Richard Preston, the enslaved man, escaped bondage by saving money and purchasing his freedom. He then traveled to Nova Scotia — one of Canada’s smallest, most remote provinces — searching for his mother, who had fled there as a refugee during the War of 1812. 

Mother and son were eventually reunited, and Preston, who had taught himself to read and write, heard the call to ministry. He studied under a local Baptist minister, then founded New Horizon, the church Bailey now pastors.

Ministering to the church wasn’t on Bailey’s radar until 2017, when he entered Virginia Union University’s Global Leadership Cohort, a doctoral program. It dispatched eight students, two by two, to Canada, Zimbabwe, India and Haiti. 

He chose Nova Scotia because he wanted to learn what happened to enslaved people who escaped from Maryland and other parts of the United States and settled in Canada.

‘Use Your Own Book’

Bailey spent about a month studying New Horizons, interviewing its pastor, members, community leaders, police officials, and other professionals. His dissertation examined how churches in Canada could develop greater leadership capacity.

The editor reviewing his dissertation told him it read less like a traditional academic paper and more like a guidebook.

“She said, ‘You are telling people how to literally build leadership capacity in churches in Canada,’” Bailey recalled.

Eight years later, that guidebook became a blueprint for his own ministry.

Bailey had begun sensing a call to the pastorate, but none of the available churches felt right. Then, an email arrived from his former professor. The pastor who had supervised Bailey’s international doctoral work was retiring, and New Horizons wanted him to apply, so he did.

His next concern was distance: Halifax is in another country, even if the flight home to Baltimore can take only about three hours with a connection.

Then Bailey remembered the editor’s words about his dissertation.

“God brought that thought back to me and said, ‘Now go apply. You didn’t sell it. You do it,’” he said. “Use your own book.”

Divine Intervention

There was still one more person who needed convincing: Bailey’s wife.

He submitted the application while the couple was vacationing in the Virgin Islands, suggesting that she go to the pool while he handled “one little thing.”

“She said, ‘Application for what?’” Bailey recalled. “I said, ‘For the pastor in Nova Scotia. But you go on to the pool.’”

The selection process unfolded through a series of doors opening at exactly the right time. 

After an initial interview, the church requested a video of Bailey preaching, and then asked for another. Bailey, who served at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, did not have a recent second sermon because Bishop Walter Scott Thomas Sr. and Rev. Dr. Walter Scott Thomas Jr. regularly preached.

Then Thomas underwent shoulder surgery and could not preach as planned. Bailey was asked to step in. That gave New Horizons the sermon it needed.

Eventually, Bailey learned that, under the church’s denominational process, he wasn’t just one of several candidates being invited to preach. He was the final candidate. 

He interviewed with the committee on Saturday and preached Sunday morning — a sermon he doesn’t remember. 

“I preached something, and they liked it,” he said.

Building on Heritage and History

The congregation called him, and Bailey arrived in Halifax in May. His September 6 induction service  — the Canadian term for what many Black Baptist churches in the United States call an installation — brings his Baltimore and Nova Scotia communities together.

The transition has required more than learning new terminology. As a U.S. citizen working abroad,, Bailey had to obtain a Canadian work permit and social insurance number change his driver’s license, and get used to a different health care, currency and tax system.

He is also moving from a megachurch environment to a congregation of about 150 members — a number Bailey believes is just right, given the challenge and scope of his transition.

“When you add 150 members, plus a whole different country context, a whole different health care system and a whole different government parliamentary system, everything is totally different,” he said. “All of that adds up.”

At New Horizons, he is helping build systems he once took for granted, including a church-management database and an upgraded livestream operation. His challenge is to honor a congregation rich in African Nova Scotian history while reaching young adults asking what that history means for their lives in 2026.

‘They Don’t Take No Stuff’

He has also encountered a Black community accustomed to fighting for recognition and justice. Bailey points proudly to Viola Desmond, the Black Nova Scotian entrepreneur and civil rights activist featured on Canada’s $10 bill.

“One thing I love about the African Nova Scotian people: They don’t take no stuff,” he said. “If something is wrong, they fight for it.”

While racism exists in Canada, Bailey saysut he has noticed a different response when injustice is confronted. In the United States, he said, racism has been allowed “out of the basement” and onto the front porch.

Yet the heart of Bailey’s assignment remains the church. Worship at New Horizons is unmistakably Baptist, complete with gospel music, although liturgical dance may soon be “coming to a theater near you.” Bailey has been given room to reshape the service while respecting the congregation’s traditions.

His wife still misses their children, grandchildren and extended family. But whenever homesickness comes, Bailey said, church members surround her with love.

And each Sunday, the call becomes clearer.

“Every time I have an exciting sermon to preach — which is every Sunday — you just feel it,” Bailey said. “God places you somewhere.”