Sisters
and brothers of the downtown Toronto congregation, I come before you
this morning as a herald of good news. This is news that I've wanted
to bring for quite a long time. A long time whose duration has
stretched from months to years and more again. Most recently, on
three successive occasions, our date was pushed back due to snow.
But last Wednesday, February 20, Mike and I finally crossed the
border with our moving truck filled with objects meticulously
itemized for Immigration Canada, and officially “landed,”
becoming legal Canadian residents.
In
some ways, our movement from the States to Canada has paralleled our
congregation's movement from this historic building to a new
location. It's loomed ahead of us for many years — overlapping
years — the very first time we attended this congregation a little
over four years ago, there happened to be a meeting after the worship
service about whether or not the building should be sold to a
developer. Feelings at that meeting were running deep and strong.
In part, these were connected to memory and past disagreement over
previous congregational amalgamation in the GTA — something that,
at the time, I had no awareness of and even now only share
second-hand. But my ignorance of the specifics met my passion head
on — and passion won out. I'd really enjoyed my first service
here, encountering all of you, and I was worried it would be lost
before I could become a part of it. I remember — that first
meeting — speaking up and saying that, as a denomination, Community
of Christ can't be continually closing churches; rather, we need to
be continually refilling empty pews.
