After five years of guiding St Mark’s Anglican Church, the Reverend Gavin Tyte will bid farewell to Bermuda next week. Sunday offers the last chance to worship with him in person before he and his wife, Helen, head back to Britain.

There, they will start their work with FAB Church, the online community they are preparing to launch with a focus on supporting LGBTQ+ and disabled people.

“We feel like our calling is particularly for the marginalised — those people who have been rejected by churches or feel unaccepted by churches, wherever they are in the world. It hasn't launched fully yet, but we're going to be leading an online church, which means we can work from anywhere in the world.”

While the move is something they feel they’ve been led to do, St Mark’s and its people will always hold a special place in their hearts.

“I've served in five or six different Anglican churches over the years, and St Mark's is the most friendly, welcoming church I've ever been part of. I will dearly, dearly miss our friends that we have made here. That's going to be the hardest thing.”

“Rev Gav”, as he is affectionately known, landed in Bermuda in 2019 after serving as vicar of another far-flung British Overseas Territory — Ascension Island. A remote volcanic isle tucked away in the South Atlantic, Ascension lies nearly 1,000 miles off the coast of Africa.

“It’s about the same size as Bermuda, but with about 800 people — so tiny, really. We were there and we saw the job advertised in Bermuda and applied.”

Although the Tytes weren’t familiar with Bermuda they soon discovered they had a few “really strange” connections to it.

Rev Gav’s great-great-grandfather and his brother, Stephen, both came to Bermuda where they continued the cabinetry business they had started in Britain.

A wooden box Stephen made for Queen Victoria sits in the Royal Collection, described as “one of the most important art collections in the world”.

The craftsman was also an Anglican, and sang in the Cathedral choir — a musical tie with his great-great-nephew, a music producer and pioneer in the beatboxing scene.

It’s not a relationship most Bermudians would readily recognise. The Tytes changed the spelling of their name to Tite once here.

“It was very strange going into the Cathedral and looking at the roll of honour and there's a Tite listed on there, obviously from the UK,” Rev Gav said. “It's a very, very rare name. There are very few Tytes in the world. And so to discover a whole line of Tites in Bermuda was interesting.”

On moving here he met three generations of his relatives, distant cousins who also happened to be parishioners at St Mark’s.

Having lived in Lyme Regis, a coastal town in Dorset, England, a big thrill was being able to explore St George, its Bermuda twin.

“It was even stranger going back to Lyme Regis to see our family and sitting on the Cobb — this famous kind of harbour wall — and seeing [Hamilton town crier] Ed Christopher and Mayor [Quinell] Francis from Bermuda there, but also seeing the fishermen whose kids I baptised, with the boats behind us. It was like these two worlds colliding. Just too weird,” he said.

Another interesting link was that the Reverend John Stow, the priest-in-charge of Holy Trinity Church and St Mark’s Church, was once the vicar of the church where the Tytes married in Lyme Regis.

“So he knew everybody we knew in that area. We've got mutual friends. It was just very strange applying for a job, and then discovering all that afterwards.”

Another unexpected discovery was that one of their parishioners, the paediatrician Richard Fulton, had previously worked with Dr Bill — a doctor from Ascension Island who served as one of Rev Gav’s referees for the job in Bermuda — and that Dr Fulton’s wife, Shirene, had grown up with Dr Bill’s daughter.

“With all these connections it was just like, ‘I think it might be meant to be’.”

At St Mark’s he found a church that was declining in numbers. Rev Gav is proud to have helped breathe new life into the parish, doubling its congregation and introducing modern elements of worship.

“We were brought in to help turn the church around, to engage with families and introduce new music, bring it into the 21st century, and that's what we did,” he said.

“A lot of new people have joined the church. We have a thriving junior church now, we have the funkiest music.

“I don't know how you measure success, but I think it's been growing numerically and it's also grown spiritually as well.”

His hope from the start was to build up St Mark’s and eventually hand it over to a Bermudian priest, a goal he continues to support as the church moves forward.

“In the rainbow community there are a lot of people who feel rejected by the churches. There is no church where they feel where they belong. We are reaching the trans community and also those who are non-binary in terms of their gender.

“We’re also meeting the needs of people who have disabilities, so they might have visual impairments or physical impairments that prevent them from physically being able to attend a local church.”

To do that, he and his wife will draw on their “many years of experience” running online communities and making material as web designers, digital music creators and content producers.

“We're very much in the online space so it makes a lot of sense for us to be doing that in terms of our own skills and talents,” Rev Gav said.

He spent the past two years building a custom platform for FAB Church, which now has about 40 people online and offers resources to anyone interested, whether or not they were official members.

“We're stepping out in faith. If there's people that would love to sponsor our work, that would be amazing. It would be a bit like being a patron of what we do.”

The Tytes regularly write, produce, and publish daily Bible devotions, along with a weekly insight, podcast, and Bible study, and occasionally release digital books and music.

“These are all to serve a community of people who want to find God, but find it difficult to find an expression locally where they can do that because of their disability, their sexuality, their gender or their life circumstances,” he explained.

“So we’re reaching into that community, and we actually also reach into other online rainbow communities and share the materials. We reach people that way too.”

Their followers are already scattered across the globe — living in Bermuda, Britain, Canada and Australia.

“We try not to rely too much on social media. But we have WhatsApp groups for guests. We have WhatsApp groups for members.

“Helen and I do a lot of pastoral care, a lot of one-on-one with individuals who are members or guests of FAB Church, and that includes Zoom calls, Facetime, video chats, [telephone] calls as well as text. So there's a lot of communication involved,” he said.

“But we also meet people face to face. We're going to Ontario in August — we'll be meeting some people face to face there. We'll definitely be meeting people wherever we are in the world.”

The journey means leaving Bermuda and the friends they have met here behind. It also means a change in how they minister.

“It's a difficult thing because with FAB Church being online, it doesn't fit the Anglican Church because the Anglican Church is a parochial ministry.

“It is based on physical diocese with physical churches that have geographical boundaries.

“In Bermuda, you have nine parishes and there's a parish church for each. Online stuff kind of crosses parish boundaries. It crosses diocesan boundaries. It crosses country boundaries.

“So within the Anglican Church in terms of the hierarchy, there's no mechanism for it to support a purely online church,” he said.

“I still feel like I'm Anglican in my roots, but the church will be an independent church. In a way, we see ourselves as kind of missionaries into online culture.”

• For more information on FAB Church or to send a farewell note to Gavin and Helen Tyte, e-mail gavintyte@gmail.com or visitfab.church