History
the beginning: 1992
Grace Toronto has, literally, two histories. The first history is the Grace Toronto of 1992-2004, when a visionary church planter named Stephen Beck came to Toronto to start the church. Under his leadership, the church flourished in the downtown core, growing to two services and outgrowing several facilities. However, after a decade or so of ministry here, Stephen and Susan felt God’s call to go teach theology and church planting in Germany. The church was unable to replace their unique style of leadership, and a difficult period of decline ensued after they left to raise funds for their next assignment.
re-planting Grace, the second beginning: 2005
In 2004, Dan and Sue MacDonald were contacted and asked to consider moving from Florida to Toronto to renew the work started by the Becks. After several visits over a period of six months, they decided that God was calling them to do it. In Easter of 2005, they announced that they would come. The church was, by this time, reduced to a handful of people, so Dan and Sue, under the guidance of the denomination, re-planted the church from the ground up.
In June 2005, Dan and Sue arrived and started re-planting with fewer than ten people from the original church. After a summer of networking, outreach, and informational meetings, they started two small groups in the fall. These groups started to grow slowly, and by the end of November, around forty people were regularly attending the mid-week gatherings. The group decided to put on a Sunday morning Christmas service to test the waters, and the service went well, with about eighty people in attendance.
Encouraged, the core group decided to start evening services in March 2006. Starting with a whopping twenty-two people in the first service, the church built momentum, and people started inviting friends and co-workers. By late spring, the services were up to forty attendees.
a summer of miracles: 2006
During that summer, we began to look for leased space to have a morning service. After a month of futility, our realtor suggested we look at buying a building. Dan replied to him, “We are about forty people with almost no money; I think this is a bit of a stretch.” The realtor replied: “But don’t you believe in a God who made, like, the whole universe in seven days? C’mon, where’s your faith?” Dan was challenged by the realtor’s rather profound theological statement, and the group started looking around.
We found a beautiful building on a quiet street in the heart of downtown for sale for $2.2 million dollars. It turned out that the sale of the property was being managed by a man who was a former client of Dan’s when Dan practiced law, and he quickly became the church’s champion to the owner of the property.
By God’s providence, it turned out that the owner was a Christian. We have never met him, but he generously agreed to donate $775,000 toward the purchase of his own building! Then, an old family friend of Sue’s had heard of our attempt to buy a building, and they offered to lend us over $650,000 dollars, interest free! So by God’s grace, a ragtag little church of 40 people got a 2 million dollar building in the heart of the city.
a season of growth: fall 2006-2009
Since that fateful summer, Grace Toronto has steadily grown. We now occupy our own building, have begun a morning service, have run out of room in that service, and have recently started a second service in the evening. Hope Toronto, our mercy and justice ministry, was established and now has thirty people actively volunteering monthly and over one hundred people serving throughout the year with their small groups. The Grace Centre, a centre designed to equip Christian lay people to live out their faith in the city, has begun training people from several different churches. Our Faith/Work ministry has begun vocational groups where people from within a profession (e.g., artists and medical professionals) are meeting to learn about how to apply Christian principles more effectively within their professions. Our arts ministry has developed an excellent outreach to artists called MEZZANINE, which is now beginning to train Christian artists.
A good work has begun; a church has been re-planted; a new city is rising in the midst of this great city. We thank God for his grace in our lives.
