We asked Grace Toronto congregants what life together looked like in our pandemic year.

In 1935, the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to his native Germany, then darkening under the clouds of Nazism, to take charge of a clandestine seminary. Close communal living with other seminarians, shared meals, morning and evening prayers, and daily worship, brought Bonhoeffer deeper into what it means to live with Christ. This became a central theme of his teaching and preaching, and three years later (shortly before the seminary was to be closed by the Gestapo, though he could not have known it) Bonhoeffer published a brief but profound theological reflection on Christian community titled Gemeinsames Leben, "Life Together."

Although Bonhoeffer's book describes the habits and rhythms of his cloistered fellowship, alongside “The Day With Others” he devotes a parallel chapter to “The Day Alone.” The essential togetherness of the Christian life he envisions is not ultimately dependent on being with others. Bonhoeffer describes the practice of community that he enjoyed as a privilege, the tangible experience of a spiritual truth that does not depend on him—“it is a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.” This is a source of comfort for Bonhoeffer and his companions, because no hostile regime can touch their “life together.” The Gestapo could no more disperse this reality than the Romans could kill Christ. Of course, Christians still “yearn” to be together with other Christians as an expression of God’s presence and work, but we should not take that visible community for granted. The “life together” that Bonhoeffer describes, in all its dimensions, is a gift.

We have never been so disconnected from the physical presence of the Christian life together in Toronto as we have since March 2020. As Toronto passed the one-year anniversary of going into lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic, the three of us set out to talk to a variety of people in the Grace Toronto community. Through the isolation of lockdown, the virtual presence of video calls with friends and family, the stress of constant risk assessment and the perpetual motion news cycle—through it all, how did we feel the gift and the loss of life together? The pages that follow capture the larger conversation that occurred over nine interviews we conducted in April 2021. We have arranged excerpts together to give a sense of common themes and put our interviewees into dialogue with each other, but have not smoothed out contrasting experiences or perspectives. The “story” of this conversation is not how much the same we are.

One of the most prominent images of the church in the New Testament is the body of Christ, which provides a vision for how many individuals could become one whole. Paul writes to the Corinthian church, for example, that “just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” Twenty-first century science gives this metaphor extra texture. Modern medicine shows that our cells are constantly being renewed and replaced, but no matter how much our bodies change, even as they affect our abilities or personalities or ways of being in the world, they remain ours because of the unique bond between a body and a spirit. No matter how Christians are changed by the collective and individual traumas of the pandemic, the presence of the Spirit guarantees that we remain part of Christ's body—the persistent reality that Bonhoeffer describes—and this unity persists across time and space.

The image of the church as the body of Christ also has something to teach us about how we endure and remember collective experiences like the pandemic. We are colloquially familiar with the concept of muscle memory, when a specific movement becomes so familiar through repetition that it is executed effortlessly and subconsciously—riding a bike, typing on a keyboard, playing an instrument, and so on. What would “muscle memory” look like in the body of Christ? What habits have we stored up in our relationships and interactions at Grace Toronto or other Christian communities that remind us that we are still a body, a unity, a “together”? Sociologists have shown that human beings form and preserve memories communally, reinterpreting and reinforcing our memories of events by sharing them with other people and having those stories repeated back to us. The Spirit that animates Christians and gives us our shared identity also equips us for the prophetic role of telling the good news of the gospel, which includes reminding each other of God's sovereign plan for the cosmos and Christ's ultimate victory in the spiritual reality of our world.

That work of reminding and remembering is one of Bonhoeffer’s lessons for his readers. It is essential to the work of building a visible Christian life together, he writes, which “depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish be­tween a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community.” This is one of those right times.

To represent the spiritual character of Christian community and centre the “muscle memory” of the body of Christ, quotations from our interviews are organized around the defining acts of Grace Toronto's worship services. Day in and day out, this is the arc of the Christian life:

God Calls

God Cleanses

God Communes

God Commissions

Our goal in this piece is an act of remembering that records the experience of this pandemic year for our Toronto church, recognizing the blessings and losses of our human community and looking for God’s work running through it all. We want to honour the individual threads while starting to weave the collective story, and invite our community and readers to reflect on the resilient spiritual reality that is Christian life together.

Quotations from interviewees have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Interviewees

Esther Campuzano began attending Grace Toronto several years ago as a spiritual seeker. She became a member of Grace Toronto Church during the pandemic.

Simon Davis was serving as Executive Director of Grace Toronto Church until the summer of 2021.

Chun Ling Ho, a professional videographer, took a contract position to help produce the Sunday worship videos. More recently, he’s taken the full-time staff position of worship director.

Joanne Hodges is mom to four young children and an active leader with Moms of Grace Toronto downtown. During the pandemic, she helped create Pandemic Partners, a group which supported mothers during the lockdown. 

Adam Hu began serving as worship intern in September 2021. With the worship director position vacant, he took on extra responsibilities to plan and coordinate music ministry online.

Onize Ighodaro has been a part of the Grace Toronto community for nine years. She continues to build and foster community through her personal, ongoing commitment to Grace Gatherings. 

Bryan Lee was serving as a pastoral intern at the start of the pandemic. Because of his technical background in marketing and production, he quickly became one of the team leaders as the church pivoted to online worship.

Lydia Low-Yeung provides spiritual care and discipleship for the women of Grace West. She currently lives with her husband and three children in Little Portugal. 

Linda Sadlowski currently works in communications in the downtown core. During the lockdown, she became a host for the virtual coffee hour after seeing the new ways God was nurturing community even amidst physical separation.

God Calls

The gospel is good news we rehearse together, week after week. Every time we gather for corporate worship, we remember we are called to belong to God, and we respond to this divine call. During the pandemic, creativity and collaboration were needed for transitioning to virtual services. When gathering for Sunday worship was curtailed, we had to reimagine life together as God’s called people. 

What new habits of togetherness did we learn as God’s called people?

How did we lean on each other during this difficult year?

How did we find new and creative ways to worship?

God Cleanses

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve reckoned with the idea of repentance: corporate repentance over ways in which racial injustice has lived within the Church, realizations that we’ve sometimes prioritized well-polished productions over finding ways to safely do life together, even letting our anxieties turn into Netflix binges and grocery hoarding. The scandal of grace is that Christ never leaves us in our sin. Instead of casting us off, Christ affirms our value, helps us bury our false identities and idols, and safely leads us in the way of repentance.

How has this year brought to light the extent of our sin and the need for God's mercy? 

When have our words amplified division and breakdown, over unity and grace?

How have we been made even more aware of Christ's affirmation and love for us throughout this difficult year?

God Communes

Hundreds of years before his birth, Jesus Christ was prophesied to be Immanuel, the God who is with us. Perhaps Christ’s omnipresence, or his promise that he’d never leave or forsake us, has meant more during this pandemic season than ever before. Working, creating, raising children, fighting sin, and pursuing God during this past year have occurred in much more solitary ways. In the midst of deep loneliness, though, Christ has sustained and brought us opportunities for community. Not only have we seen our community refined and strengthened, we’ve seen new, surprising life come from previously barren ground.

How did we continue to do life together during this seismic shift?

How did we recognize God’s hand at work during the pandemic?

What aspects of our church community were actually strengthened during this season?

God Commissions

Just as the gospel calls us out of the world to belong to God, it sends us back into the world to proclaim the good news of Christ. In other words, the Monday-through-Saturday scattering of believers is as important as our weekly gathering. Perhaps one gift of the pandemic is a larger vision of church, that Grace Toronto Church is not simply the stone and mortar building at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton streets. It’s the people of God, seeding Toronto’s neighbourhoods with faith, hope, and love.

How did you sense God’s calling for you grow or change during the past year?

What new kinds of interactions have you had with your neighbours as a result of the pandemic?

How has worshipping or meeting for small groups online equipped us differently?

Text: Caitlin Condit, Joel Faber, Jen Michel

Art: Becky Chai