Our History
The history of Grace Toronto is one of the grace of God, a few miracles, and people who love and long for Christ.
1992
2005
2006
1992
The Beginning
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.
2005
Re-planting Grace:
The Second Beginning
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.
2006
A Summer of Miracles
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.
In 2017, we moved into and renovated our new home in the heart of the city — a place for Grace to gather and a hub for faith-based outreach downtown.
1878
St. Andrew's Church
Old St. Andrew's Church was built by Langley & Burke and dedicated in 1878 for the Rev. M.G. Milligan and the remaining congregation of the original St. Andrew's Church. The building was designed in a Gothic style with a linear orientation on an East-West axis, with towers dominating the western side where the main entrances are located.
The facade is a simple-yet-elegant design featuring groupings of stained-glass windows on the north, east and south sides of the building, to allow maximum light exposure during the morning hours when services would take place. The materials used in the construction are brick, wood, stone and stained-glass.
The exterior shows mainly the brick and stone elements, while the interior reveals more of the warm wood texture complemented by the intimate lighting from the stained-glass windows. The approximate dimensions of the building are 36 meters by 25 meters for the body of the building, 17 meters high to the top of the pitched roof, and 46 meters and 25 meters to the tops of the two steeples.
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2012
Stained Glass of St. Andrew's
The stained glass windows of St. Andrew's church were designed by German artist Lutz Haufschild and installed in 1989. There are several sets of glass, each with specfic colours and meanings.
North Trinity Windows - Red symbolizes God, the sun rise, sun set, the beginning and the end. This window has the most colour of all three trinity windows and Haufschild said while standing in the church, "if I were to do it all again I would use less colour." The windows, even on a cloudy day, fill the church with light.
The South Trinity Windows - The Blue symbolizes Jesus. The tree, which can be seen through the window changes the colour of the window through the seasons. The green leaves block the summer sun, but also cast a green hue through the window, while in the fall warmer colours of the changing leaves can be seen.
The West Trinity Windows - Yellow symbolizes the Holy Spirit. Haufschild states that the windows contain a lot of white glass as an expression of opening, the hope and freedom for the refugees and a clear experience of the inside and outside as the same time. He also said that he feels fortunate to have had a studio inside the church. "I walked through every day in all kinds of light conditions and really got the chance to understand the space."
Beside the Trinity windows and the lower windows are windows containing the Lord's Prayer in multiple languages published in 1685 by Latvian Lutheran Pastor Janis Reiters.
2017
Modernization of 383 Jarvis
After the purchase of 383 Jarvis, the building went under extensive renovations to modernize and restore the space. Offices were put into the basement, new pews and a stage were put into the sanctuary, and both halls were given a face lift to accomodate our growing church.
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