Let Us Make: A Call to Create in Community

When our family moved to Toronto almost ten years ago, I would not have called myself a writer, even though I did get paid for occasional freelance work. A “real” writer was someone like my college roommate. She had written a short story in serial for me when I was 20 and spending the summer in Africa. I’d rip another large envelope every time a new one arrived to devour the next installment of the drama that featured me and my boyfriend as main characters.

My roommate appreciated Faulkner. She read the Bible in Elizabethan English. For good measure, she was given to bouts of melancholy, and I always imagined her riding out the storm by reading dark and brooding poetry. She was the writer; I was not.

After I moved to Toronto, however, I couldn’t ignore the nudge—no, the urgency—to write. During that season, I was stuck ruminating on an ancient praise-poem, Psalm 78, which details the chronic amnesia of the nation of Israel. They constantly forgot what their God had done for them, how their God had miraculously rescued them. The message of the psalm seemed clear enough, that memory is a spiritual habit far more important than mere recollection. It seemed just one more reason to write.

But this nudge—to write—might have been as easily abandoned as it was eventually entertained. There were (and are) always good reasons not to write. In my case, however, I had the particular blessing of finding myself in a community of writers (and other makers) at Grace Toronto Church. These were people who affirmed that creative work is good, necessary, even holy work, and I found reason to name my desire to write as God-given.

I’d found my people, as they say—and as it turns out, that community really mattered.

Many years later, I now have the privilege of serving as the lead editor for Imprint magazine, a not-for-profit publication of Grace Toronto Church and The Grace Centre for the Arts. It feels like a particularly exciting time for the magazine right now. For the fourth time, we’re launching another print issue into the world. As anyone with an appreciation for deadlines can imagine, the past weeks have been busy as our team has worked to ready our final PDF for the print, move all of our ordering online, and get the word out.

But here’s the thing: it’s never lonely work.

What I didn’t understand all those years ago that the call to write wasn’t just a call to some solitary, quiet corner of my house where I could stay tucked away from the children, my head bent over my keyboard. The call to write was also a call to participate in something far bigger than anything that I could create on my own. It was a call to a new kind of possible—when many hands, offering many gifts, commit to a task together.

Every day, I marvel at the energy, the devotion, the commitment of every member of our Imprint team. I want you to know all of them, which is why, in the days and weeks ahead, we hope to bring you some behind-the-scenes interview with other Imprint volunteers. You’ll get to see who is at the other end of the lens, the pencil, the paintbrush.

Here’s the thing: all of us at Imprint have committed to this work for at least two reasons.

First, we believe that creative gifts are worth offering in the world. We want to provide community for the artists and graphic designers, the photographers and poets, the novelists and the editors within our congregation and to say to them: your desire to create matters. Can we come alongside you to help you cultivate your God-given gifts?

Second, we believe that those gifts reflect our Maker—the God who hovered over the vast and empty darkness of the world before he filled it with light. As people of faith, we’re not at all interested in art that’s instrumental or gimmicky, and we’re not producing religious propaganda. Instead, as we write essays and compose poems, as we illustrate and photograph, we want to pose interesting questions and ultimately ask: what story makes the best sense of the world as we know it? We aren’t shy to say we think the Christian story—of God become man in order to be broken for us—commends itself for serious consideration and commitment, but our approach is hospitable. As Jesus said so warmly to the spiritual seeker of his day, Come and see.

That’s what we hope you’ll do as you flip through the pages of Imprint’s 2020 Freedom issue. You can get your copy now through November 8th at our shop page. We’ll be mailing the magazine mid-November!

Text: Jen Pollock Michel