Condo Church In Liberty Village (Darryl Dash)
Darryl Dash - Liberty Grace Church, Toronto
On today’s episode, we are going to here from Darryl Dash, a pastor who has planted a church in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighbourhood. It’s an old industrial and institutional neighbourhood that has been transformed into residential condo developments.
Liberty Grace Church is a young Fellowship Evangelical Baptist church. They are in a neighbourhood where most people can go through their secure entry, hop on an elevator and disappear into their home without really needing to encounter their neighbours.
How do you crack the community code and make a lasting impact in a place that the average person will live in for just a couple years?
Our session today is a workshop that Darryl gave at the Our City Toronto conference in September 2019. This was an urban practitioner event with some incredible people from the GTA sharing their stories and insights. The event was hosted at Stone Church. Down the road, we will feature a few more episodes that came out of that conference.
He’s also the author of ‘How To Grow: Applying the Gospel to All of Life’.
Darryl Dash is also the cofounder of Gospel For Life and director of Advance Church Planting Institute. He has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and has over 25 years of ministry experience.
We all can point to low income high rises that struggle with multi-level problems—gang and drug activity, mental health issues, food insecurity, pest control and the list goes on.
But, how about the other, high rise buildings that people live in?
Have you lived or stayed in a downtown condo in a major city? In my travels I usually prefer to book an Airbnb over a hotel chain. More than once I’ve stayed downtown in a condo and caught glimpses of what that kind of urban life may be like.
Well, if you live in a condo you are not alone. It has become a desirable domicile for many.
In 2017, CBC’s reporter Pete Evans wrote an article on Canadians living in Condos.[1]
Let me read some key points for us to consider:
Statistics Canada says almost 1.9 million Canadian households were living in condominiums as of 2016. Among that group, just over two-thirds were owners, while 616,570 Canadians rented them.
As is to be expected, there is wide variety across the country when it comes to the popularity of condos as a choice of places to live.
In Vancouver, for example, more than 30 per cent of the population lives in condos, the highest percentage in Canada by far. Condos are home to 21.8 per cent of Calgarians, followed by Abbotsford-Mission, Kelowna and Toronto, all of which have more than one out of every five households living in a condominium.
In other cities, meanwhile, condos barely rate as a living option. In Greater Sudbury, Ont., Saint John, Thunder Bay, Ont. St. John's, Peterborough, Ont. and Belleville, Ont. less than one out of every 20 people live in a condo.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/census-housing-1.4370757