Thomas Reginald Harding

Thomas Reginald Harding (1944-2025)

The family of Thomas Reginald Harding, born October 6, 1944 in Prince Rupert, BC, is sad to announce his death at Nanaimo Regional Hospital on July 5, 2025. Thomas was a man of many talents and passions.

He was a lifelong hunter, fisher, gatherer, and back to the land advocate, who loved life on the water on his beloved sailboat, La Sonrisa II, travelling the BC Coast for many years before retiring to a small property, Commonwealth Cooperative Farm on Gabriola Island, with his longest-suffering fourth wife, Elizabeth Beale, to build a small cabin, grow food, and support the local sustainable living community.

In earlier years, Thomas was also an academic, liturgical scholar and minister in The United Church of Canada. He served churches in Andrew AB, Calgary, Beaverlodge AB, Burnaby, Vancouver and southern Ontario over a varied career, eventually completing a Th.D. in the history of worship in The United Church, teaching at theological colleges in Vancouver and Toronto, with a final stretch in the 1990s as Executive Director of The Churches’ Council on Theological Education in Canada. Thomas loved his family – he raised three sons in the 1960s to 1980s, then step-parented two more groups of step-children, the Mangans and the Beales – a wide group of people nurtured in his loving embrace.

He will be missed by his many and varied family and friends.

A celebration of Thomas’s life is still being arranged, likely on Gabriola Island sometime in early October around his birthday.