“Living with Christ” - In Person and Online
by RC
For some seven or eight years now, Rev. Jonah Evans’ “Living with Christ” group has been the highlight of my week. The group meets on Wednesday about 10 am, not long after the Act of Consecration service, here at the Toronto Christian Community church, and continues until about 11:30.
The Christian Community inToronto’s Chapel, Foyer and Bookstore, March 2022
For those of us who don’t manage to carry the consciousness of Christ’s presence with us throughout our day, this group provides at least one weekly point of contact. It’s hard to put in words exactly what happens in the course of this group. Outwardly Jonah is talking about aspects of Christ Jesus in relation to the human soul, sharing his personal insights and stories related to anthroposophical theology, with reference to Rudolf Steiner and other contemporary sources, often beginning with a theme like the seasonal liturgy from the Act of Consecration of Man. But inwardly, for me at least, most times the group experience results in a feeling of closeness to Christ, an almost palpable feeling of having been at least somewhat in his presence. I feel my heart has been touched in a way that doesn’t happen much in the rest of my life.
However, although that’s what it’s like for me most of the time, it is not something that happens for me every time the group meets. Perhaps sometimes my heart is too closed to the experience, or maybe other people or other factors prevent it for me; but the fact that it sometimes doesn’t work, just underlines the amazingness of all those times that the experience that I’ll call the feeling of the presence of Christ Jesus does actually happen. I credit my participation in this group with helping me draw closer to Jesus and to deeper participation in the life of the Christian Community in recent years. I am now in year two of the seminary’s “Distance Learning Program” (DLP2) and I try to attend the services as often as I can.
We are blessed here in Toronto to have services on weekdays while Seminary classes are on and I try to be there most days. Just this year I have become a server as well, as a further step on my path to “grokking” the Act of Consecration. In the past, although I was married in the Christian Community, came to occasional services, had my children baptized and confirmed there, I was inwardly not fully connected or engaged. Thanks to Jonah, and his “Living with Christ” group, that has changed for me over the last several years. And it’s been a blessing.
So, what happens in this group? It starts like this — after a few introductory greetings and some words from Jonah, participants are invited to join in a group prayer with words taken from the start of the Act of Consecration of Man, “My heart be filled with your pure life, O Christ”. Before Jonah speaks those words however, we are invited to come to ourselves in a minute or so of silence, to let go of other thoughts and concerns, and just be. Then Jonah repeats the words of the prayer three times in an earnest heartfelt tone, as we repeat it to ourselves in our hearts, and then after some more silence, we open our eyes and rejoin the group. There have been a few variations on this theme over the years. Online participants are invited to turn their hearts away from the screen while participating in the prayer.
Then after the introductory prayer, Jonah presents his thoughts for an hour or so until about 11 am. Then the floor is opened up for questions either from those present or from online participants. And these are often not trivial questions. They are questions informed by the gravitas of what Jonah has been able to present, and they often lead to fruitful learnings and realizations. Of course, there are those who bring a humorous element into the meetings as well, and it is really educational to see how well Jonah handles things that might otherwise be taken as being a little off topic. Then when 11:30 rolls around, Jonah often ends the group with the Lord’s Prayer. Then, after the online connections are shut down, there are sometimes further discussion with Jonah and those present.
For many years, pre-Covid, “Living with Christ” was purely an in-person experience. Jonah used to like to have it in the church library, with everyone, sometimes up to 20 of us, crowded around the long table there. It was an intimate space, and a space that had been conditioned through repeated use. But over the past two years, with the restrictions of Covid, rather than shut the group down entirely, Jonah chose to embrace the new online, zoom-meeting format, even though it was harder for him to present without a studio audience to connect with.
A snapshot of the early days of the “Living with Christ” group in the church library…
Then later, as restrictions relaxed a bit, in-person participants came as well, so that now the group seems solidly established as a hybrid of in-person and online participation. Currently it takes place in the larger community room space where in-person participants are not so crowded together. And now that we have seen how much it means to so many to have online access to the group, I don’t know if it will ever go back to it being a purely in-person group. It has been a light in the darkness of Covid, that so many more people have been able to participate in and experience this group and this work. Many of the in-person participants have been coming for years to the group, and some of the online participants have come in-person previously. Typically, these days there are about 50 to 60 people joining online. And many more watch the recording.
Rev. Jonah Evans during the “Living with Christ” group’s weekly lecture and question period.
Until recently the “Living with Christ” group was an offering of the Toronto Christian Community, but just this year some students of the Seminary of the Christian Community in North America attend. The Seminary is located in an adjacent building — the manse of the church here in Toronto (Thornhill). To my way of thinking, the “Living with Christ” group was a forerunner of the Seminary. It was already doing the work of the Seminary before the Seminary came here. And perhaps it helped bring it about that the Seminary came here. In any case it seems entirely rightful that a group of Seminary students – the “Knowing Christ” group – now attends. Sometimes, when Jonah is otherwise occupied on a Wednesday, the Rev. Patrick Kennedy, Jonah’s co-director at the Seminary fills in with his unique contributions.
Melanie Nason — who also manages accommodation for the Seminary — sends announcements about the “Living with Christ” meetings out to a list of 192 people who have asked to be kept informed. Nowadays the meetings are recorded and made available to those who were not able to attend in person. Melanie sends out links to each week’s recording as well to 83 people who have asked for it. In our recent DLP2 discussion about what is our vineyard — in reference to the parable — Melanie said that the “Living with Christ” group was her vineyard. And she really puts her heart and soul into the work of helping it to grow and flourish, through managing the subscriber list and the recordings. She usually gets about 5 new subscribers each week.
Melanie says she gets a lot of emails from remote participants telling how the “Living with Christ” group has helped them come to terms with the pain they feel about the state of the world and how participating in this group is their lifeline. Over the past eight years, Melanie says she has only ever had three people ask to have their names removed from the list, mostly people who had been added by their friends.
If you’re not already part of this amazing “Living with Christ” group, and you want to experience it for yourself, send your request to Melanie (melanienason@rogers.com) and ask her to add you to the subscriber list. And if you’re not available to participate in the live group on Wednesday mornings, ask her to send you the recordings as well. You’ll be glad you did.
Our Author:
RC is a member of the Toronto Christian Community and a student in the Distance Learning Program offered by
the Seminary in Toronto.
Photo: the Library of the Christian Community in Toronto
This is a blog entry by a member of the Christian Community in Toronto Congregation. These are posted weekly by the student editorial team of Marc Delannoy and Silke Chatfield. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for even more weekly podcast and video content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors or the Christian Community. They are the sole responsibility of its author.