Grace Toronto. A church for the city in the city. Get to know us.

PART 1: My life before Christ
I was born and grew up in Madagascar, Africa. I went to a French-speaking high school. On the day of my 20th birthday.  I was given the lifetime opportunity to travel to France to study. So, I did my university in a lovely little town of La Rochelle, in the south-west of France.
I grew up in a nominal Catholic family. We would go to the Catholic church only on certain occasions (Easter, Christmas, first communions). Even though I was always certain that a God exists, I never really experienced Him on a personal basis. I was too busy going after girls and living a “free” life. My family would also mix Christian beliefs with traditional Malagasy beliefs, which really confused me and helped me justify my own agenda. I was certainly very confused about who God is, who Jesus is and what he did on the cross. My whole youth was a very spiritually confusing period of my life.

As I grew up, I was surrounded by religious but mostly nominal Christians. Besides the Malagasy culture in which I evolved always included the Church in the picture but I could not see any fruit and changes in the people’s lives.

As I left to go study in France, I met and dated a girl who claimed to be a Christian. One day, she invited me to go and visit her to the US where she was living for a few years. As I travelled to the US visiting her, I was introduced to Christianity by some of her friends and I experienced a Christian service for the first time. On my way back to France, I knew there was something special about those people that I really wanted to experience so I began a quest for truth. I met a friend who would organize Bible studies on our campus. I was clearly a skeptic for a while, and even though we would have a lot of debates, discussions, arguments about the Bible and its content, I never really took any formal decision to change my lifestyle and my personal beliefs.

The girl I dated decided to move back to France so we could be closer and together we decided to look for a church in Paris. As she was looking for a church, she found a local church which had the same name as her former church back in the US. We decided to check it out. It turned out to be our very first church. We loved the people and developed a very genuine relationship with the staff and the pastors, so we decided to stay and become regulars.

That is the church where I officially became a Christian and where the gospel started to really make sense for my life. One day, right after a sermon, I decided it was time for me to accept Jesus as there was nothing I could do to save myself from my sinner condition. I decided to pray and accepted him that day. On that same day, I asked to be baptized and a few weeks later, I was a born-again Christian.

PART 2: Becoming a Christian
As I became stronger in the faith, becoming a Christian has been a slow but inescapable process of change and values in my lifestyle. I had to make a lot of hard choices by parting away from very unhealthy relationship. I revamped my personal perspective about love, friendships, relationships, sex, money, power and status. It was a slow and painful process at times but clearly necessary. The girl I dated became my wife and as we got married, we wanted our marriage to be a strong and gospel-centered union. We had to learn how to live a healthy and godly relationship and to this day, we are thankful that the Lord has been with us every single day.

A few years ago, my wife and I wanted to experience life in North America. We experienced a wonderful trip to Canada visiting friends in Vancouver and since then, we wanted to experience immigration. One day, I learned that my company wanted to branch out in Canada so I took the opportunity to talk to all the right people in the organisation, so it happened. 6 months after that, we were in Canada starting a new life and looking for a church similar to our church in France.

We found Grace Toronto (or maybe I should say, Grace found us…) and here we are. For the past 3 years, we have been involved in leading Grace Gatherings, in taking part of multiple ministry opportunities and serving God in the heart of the city of Toronto. We have been really encouraged to see the church growing and see ourselves used by God to reach out to this great city.