This is Andrew and I outside the Toronto Airport Church which was, of course, the church in which the so-called “Toronto Blessing” originated. There was no prayer meeting going on today. This is not the place for me to comment any further on that movement, which over the last thirteen years has seen hundreds of thousands of people visit their facility from many different nations.
It was, however, a great privilege to be shown around the building today and to have a short meeting with Steve Long, the successor to John Arnott as main pastor of the local church that meets there.
Here is their main auditorium, which is a very versatile room, easily adapting from housing the 1000 or so who attend that campus on a Sunday (there are also three other campuses for the church) to hosting the large conferences that continue to occur there.
Steve spoke of how they have felt a need in recent years to refocus their efforts on the local church after surviving years of a constant stream of visitors for prayer ministry. They are to be commended for their goal to multiply cells and evangelise their city.
John Arnott still preaches at the church from time to time, but he now largely focuses on the many requests for help internationally they still receive.
Steve is clearly a humble, passionate pastor. I was left with the impression of a man deeply in love with Jesus. The time when he lit up most was when he started to explain what they mean by “soaking times.” In a way, I think it is a real shame that they use that novel phrase to describe something that basically seems to mean communing with God and meditating on Him. He described it as finding time individually for contemplative prayer or so-called “wasting” time intimately with God. From what he was saying, this seemed largely to represent a recovery of a timeless Christian practice rather than, as some might assume, something novel and therefore dangerous.
This picture says it all about the passion of this church. They are only too well aware, it seems, of the possibility that people visiting them might become overly focused on an experience of God. So, on the way out, you are faced with a text which perhaps more than any other urges us to remember the lost.
Those who criticized the Toronto movement the most predicted that a departure from the Gospel was inevitable. Thirteen years later, this church is led by a man who gets all his leaders to go through significant periods of theological training, and from what I saw and heard today, remains as evangelical as he ever was. 
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