Christians Who Inspire

During our 2024 Discovery Week, we visited a new Christian site – a wonderful church, unlike any I have ever encountered. The Sanctuary is a an old, partly run down church in downtown Toronto that operates like no church I’ve seen. They endeavour to live in community with Toronto’s most marginalized. Many churches provide for the homeless and the economically stressed but the Sanctuary goes beyond providing supports to live in actual community with these folks. And this is not one thing they do – it’s the church’s entire purpose and being. The Discovery Week participants were awed by these folks.

Christianity today is often equated with American politics but that portrait is partial. Approximately 2 billion people will celebrate Jesus’ birth in the coming weeks (January 7 for Orthodox Christians). As I described in an earlier blog, Jesus was notable for siding with the poor and the marginalized whereas deities in many neighbouring religions conversed with rulers and emperors. The manger scene shows a humble god, a god of the people. In that spirit, I wanted to share with you how the Sanctuary lives out the call to follow their religion’s founder. Below is my interview with Rachel Tulloch, Sanctuary’s Pastoral Director. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

 

How did you come to be here?

I moved to Toronto to study theology. I had heard about Sanctuary and had actually visited here as a teenager on a learning experience with my youth group. When I arrived in Toronto I sought them out. I started coming to church on Sundays, hanging out at the community meals, and doing outreach on Monday evenings. I quickly became immersed in the community and got to know people really well. They became my faith community and I developed good friendships here.

 

You refer to “outreach” on Mondays. What does this mean?

We would walk around the streets. in pairs usually, and sometimes we would bring things with us – hot chocolate, warm mittens, hats – and sometimes not.

 

How is the Sanctuary different from what people typically think of when they hear “church”?

Well, what we usually say is that we’re first and foremost a community and we try to put people who are usually poor and excluded in the rest of our society at the center of our community life. We try to create a place where everybody feels like they belong, everybody feels like they’re valued, that they have something to contribute.

So we do have kind of programming, but most of it is designed to create a sort of community life, a rhythm of life together that people can belong to.

So we have community meals, an art program, a women’s group, and right now we regularly do outreach to connect with people who actually don’t come through our doors but who are on the streets or living rough.

We have a Sunday worship service and we do a lot of what we call accompaniment, meaning just being with people in whatever way they need us to be. That might be having a friendship and going out for coffee or accompanying folks to appointments or visiting people in hospitals or prison, helping people clean their apartments or helping them move, things like that.

We also have a health clinic with two nurses on staff and doctors who come during our community meals to see people. Our nurses also do outreach and help people access other health services and advocate for them in those contexts. Many people who encounter too many barriers when trying to access the health system come to our clinic to receive care and they can still participate in the community meal. Many come to know and trust our nurses over time.

Overdose response is also something we do a lot of and our nurses often take the lead on this if they are around but all of our staff are trained and regularly respond as well.

 

How are you different from a social services agency?

I think for us, mutuality is really important. So we try as much as we can to unsettle the sort of helper role and the person-needing-help role.

And so we try to make sure that people who are usually just on the receiving end of other people’s help get a chance to be the helpers of others.

So, most of the people who work in our kitchen would be people with lived experience of poverty or a lack of housing of some kind. We try to provide opportunities where it’s not just about having your needs met, but it’s actually about celebrating together or sometimes unfortunately grieving together.

Ways for us just to be together as human beings instead of only concentrating on survival or having our needs met.

Although we do a fair bit of the latter as well because many people in our community actually have pretty big needs.

 

 

The folks in your kitchen, would some of them still be living on the street? Do they come off the street and work in the kitchen, eat, and then go back to the street?

Yes, some do. Some would have some form of housing, but not that adequate.

Some would have housing, but really still want community and a place to contribute.

              

Can you talk about the art?

From the very beginning, art’s been really important here. Again, it’s something beyond just a survival need. It’s actually people getting to exercise their creativity. People get to create something of beauty and color. They get to offer that to others as most of our artists will sell their artwork at our events.

And it’s an identity. It gives people an identity as a creator, as an artist. Something they’re not often recognized for.

 

And it’s mostly painting?

Yeah, a lot of painting and drawing at this point, but we would facilitate whatever people wanted to do. There was a period of time where a group of women would do quilting.

We had a sewing machine for them.

 

What does Sunday morning look like at the sanctuary?

It’s actually Sunday evening for us. We meet at 5pm. It’s a pretty informal service.

We have our communion table, our bread and wine in the middle. Everybody sits in more of a square than a circle, but around the table rather than having rows with somebody at the front. So, again, we’re trying to create this idea that all of us together are doing this worship thing rather than coming to receive worship offered by some professional people.

There’s music. People can request the songs they want.

There’s an open time for people to share what’s on their hearts, people can read something from the Bible or they can pray.

And then we share communion together. Anybody is able to go up to the table and give thanks for the bread and the wine and share it with the rest of the community.

And then we usually have a teaching time.

We have a group of teachers as well that we rotate through, so it’s not just one teacher.

 

 

Do you do that? Are you one of the teachers?

Yes, I am.

I love taking the biblical material and really connecting it with what people are dealing with in their lives and making those connections for people. I really enjoy that.

And there’s nothing like this community to make some of those stories come alive as well.

Really, I would say over the time that I’ve been here, life in this community has really shaped and formed how I see my own faith and how I read the Bible.

 

Can you say more about that?

Well, there’s so much in the Bible in terms of stories and Jesus’ teachings that focus on people who are excluded or who are kind of outcast in their own social situations.

And they end up really taking center stage in a lot of the Bible stories.

And in Jesus’ own teaching, his own describing the kingdom of God and what God’s desire for the world is, it often has to do with people who are at the bottom of the social ladder in many ways, being at the center of things, being the people where the real spiritual power happens. It is not what we expect in our dominant way of looking at things.

And so, being among people who are kind of on the outs or who are excluded, it makes many of those stories come alive.

There’s that story Jesus tells of the feast, this banquet where the people who were invited don’t come. And so they go out to the streets and invite all the people who in that time had disabilities or whatnot and really were poor.

And they’re all the ones that get invited to the banquet and the others, the people who are in positions of privilege, are the ones that are left out. So there’s always that reversing of what you would expect.

      

 

How many folks are connected to the sanctuary, would you say?

There’s different layers of connection. Our core community, people who call this home and would be here several times a week is probably 100 people.

But there’s hundreds that come through the doors. And then we have people we see on outreach who may never come through our doors at all.

 

What does a week look like at the sanctuary? You’ve got the service Sunday night. Art is on Wednesdays? Is that right?

Yes. There’s Sunday service. A little women’s group on Fridays. We provide two free meals, one on Tuesday during the day and another Thursday evening. Health Services, Housing. And then we do a lot of  accompaniment we call it, depending on what people need.

 

We often focus on how places like yours provide help to folks in need but you’ve spoken before of how much they do for you.

Yeah. I mean, I’m hesitant, I don’t want to instrumentalize people. Friendship is about more than what they do for me.

But for me personally, many of my deepest friendships are formed in this community.

Particularly my friendships with people who have a lot less privilege than I do.

I do learn a lot, I think, from people in this community about what it means to, to love, to care even when you have very little, about loyalty, about grace.

And there’s really just a vulnerability, a mutual vulnerability that happens in relationships here, that I think is hard to find a lot of times in our world, because we’re so used to putting up these walls or constructing these masks that we wear with people because of what they expect from us.

People in our community often don’t have the ability to wear those masks. They can’t really afford, they don’t have the resources or the privacy to hide all of the things that they’re going through.

So it’s sort of out there in your face. And a lot of times that brings judgment for them.

But I think when you enter into a relationship with people, you realize, oh, actually, I have all of that same vulnerable stuff inside me as well. I am just used to hiding it.

And so it brings out relationships here, brings that out in all of us, our own vulnerability, our own need, our own brokenness, in a way, our own need for connection and love.

 

For many people today, the image of Christianity is January 6, Trump, and stuff like that.

So, if someone asks “what is Christianity to you?” what would you say to them?

I think first and foremost, it’s about following Jesus. And so looking at who Jesus was, the way that Jesus lived and the things that Jesus taught.

And I don’t think the church, throughout most of its history, including now, and the public image that people see, really has done a very good job of modeling itself after Jesus, the person whose name it has taken.

Very often, the church has just sort of mirrored the values of the society around it and put a Christian stamp on whatever those values are, rather than living out the pretty alternative values that Jesus lived and taught, which was really about welcoming the outsider, about creating at least the metaphor of a table, but creating a table that everybody is welcome around, upsetting the power and privileges of the society around it.

But even beyond that, of really, truly loving each other and figuring out what that means through the day to day of life. And that’s not easy and it doesn’t always look pretty.

But it really is a kind of daily walk of love and grace and always extending that further than whatever comfortable circle we find ourselves in, just always extending that circle further.

And I think, too, for me, Christianity isn’t just about a way of living and being. It’s also that we live that way because I believe that’s what God originally intended for the world to be.

And we’ve gone way off track. And there is this hope for the future that God is one day going to make things right again. And so it doesn’t all lie in our hands to fix every problem in the world, but just to be faithful and loving in the corner of the world that we are placed in, the life that God has given us, with the hope that someday things will be made right.

And that really matters in a community like ours because we see a lot of tragedy and face a lot of things that we can’t fix for each other. And so to hold that hope together that there is a better future in store for all of us and even for those we have lost, that matters to me.

Thanks a lot, Rachel. I wish you a good Christmas and a good 2025.

Thank you so much, you too.