Elizabeth Welch had many reasons to anticipate Monday's vote to allow same-sex marriage in the Anglican Church of Canada.

“I'm a priest. I'm allowed to marry couples, which is a great joy, but I'm not allowed to be married to my partner. That's hard to bear,” said Welch, who serves as parish priest at the St. Andrew and St. Mark Church in Dorval.

In a stunning reversal, a recount on Tuesday swung the other way by a single ballot.

The same-sex marriage resolution required two-thirds of each of three orders - lay, clergy and bishops – and in the end the Anglican Church's resolution in favour of gay marriage has now passed. 

“It took a moment to sink in,” she said. “Just having the confirmation that the motion had passed and that it was definitely going to be passable in the future to proceed felt like a relief,” she said.

Welch, who moved to Quebec from San Francisco in 2012, said she already has parishioners in mind that she soon hopes to marry.

“One of the first things I did was call a member of my parish. He and his partner have been together for 39 years now and have been waiting a long time, so that was one of the first phone calls I made, to say, ‘By the way, there’s late-breaking news, the motion passed, so I hope you’re ready to hear wedding bells,’” she said.

Welch said the decision was also very important for her own reasons.

“I myself am hoping in the future to get married to my partner in the church, so it was personally also very happy news for me,” she said.

The issue isn't completely resolved: The church will still require a new vote in 2019 to confirm the change in doctrine during its synod into church law.

For Welch, though, her church is now a step closer to reflecting Canadian society's acceptance of gay marriage.

“One of the things I love about Anglican tradition is that we’ve always considered people’s lived experience to be important and to teach us something about what God is doing in our lives, that God’s activity in our lives is not limited to words we can read on a page in the bible, but that God is still working among us, and part of our job is to seek out how God might be working among us,” she said.

She also said she saw this as a time for healing for Anglicans in the LGBT community.

“There are a lot of gay, lesbian, transgender and queer Anglicans here in Montreal who have been waiting a long time, who have been really hurt by the church and who need this confirmation and this blessing,” she said.

With two-thirds acceptance at all levels of the church, Welch said she sees this as an indicator people are ready to move forward.

“I think what people have come to understand is that people who are gay or lesbian or queer or transgender are also people who fall in love, just as all humans beings do, and people through whom God works in wonderful ways,” she said. “I think we’re never going to have a unanimous voice for that, but we have clearly a majority, which is wonderful.”

With additional reporting by Stephane Giroux.