Wow. What an amazing night Passion Toronto turned out to be.

Let’s begin at the beginning. I left my house at about 1:30 to get to Spadina station for 3:00. Of course, in my usual fashion, I’m incredibly early, at 2:40. Gabe and Cat got there around 3:15 or so. And so we went down to the Ex and got there at about 3:45 or so.

The line that was there already was over 100 people. We did the Chinese thingHey! I know you! TC, right? TC! *shoveshoveshove* and found people we knew (Dan and Doreen) and joined them near the front. Apparently, there was some guy from Alberta who was there since 5 am. There were a bunch of McMaster people who were there since 1 pm and some Waterloo and Laurier people.

While we waited in line we made fun of each other and Ryerson. More and more people started coming and the line didn’t get any longer. Everyone just kept on packing closer and closer together until it was impossible to turn around. When they finally gave us tickets and opened the doors, it was to do security checks and throw out all of our food. Then we passed onto another set of doors for more waiting.

When they finally let us in for real, we walked briskly to the front and grabbed seats in the fourth row. I found it kind of amazing how most of the Chinese people knew every other Chinese person in that stadium. Anyhow, CDs were being sold for $17. Once we returned from our purchasing, our fourth row seats ended up being unused since, as it happens in pretty much every huge worship thing that I’ve been to, people were gathering in front of the stage. I turned around and saw the place filled up. Apparently, there were just under 5000 people there.

A countdown started at ten minutes and I had the misfortune of ending up behind a freaking tall guy once it hit zero and the intro video started. The video was very pretty with a lot of shots of Toronto and ended up at Ricoh. Then there was a burst of the names of all the universities and colleges in Ontario so there were shouts from different sections when their school came up.

The night began with Crowder, Tomlin, and Charlie Hall leading one of those songs that’s more of a prayer. “Christ, be the centre of our lives.” Then Louie Giglio came up and did a kind lighthearted of introduction to the night, talking about Toronto, asking where people were from, and talking about the impact and significance of this night. That never before has something like this happened before, uniting the university students of not only Toronto, but Ontario. And we prayed, praising God for this night and asking Him to come down upon the Ricoh Coliseum.

How the night went was that a worship leader would come and lead us into worship for a bit. Louie would then come out and give a short talk and ask us to pray for certain things in groups of three (he called them triangles). We’d pray for our generation, the students. We’d pray for God to use us at our campuses and for us to repent and have Him turn our hearts back to Him.

Louie came up again to deliver the message, which Alex and Cat have said is entitled “Astronomical Grace.” Apparently, it’s the same message that’s from all of the concerts in the Indescribable Tour. The gist of it is that God is ginormously huge and we are not. We are pink fleshy things on a little blue ball hanging around an average sized star living on the edge of a galaxy of around another hundred billion stars, which is just one of another hundred billion galaxies that we know of so far. That God can breath and light will come speeding out at 3.00 x 10⁸ m/s.

He showed us this:

And inside it was this:

After Louie’s message, we prayed one more time: to unite the Christians in our campuses across Canada and the world for His renown. It was lead by Kat who I think was one of the people who started YOAH with Jesse.

Then David Crowder lead us into what Louie called a “celebration.”

David Crowder is hilarious. His personality is awesome. It’s weird. It’s funny. I can see how some of his songs can be attributed by his weirdness. Out of all the Christian songwriters, his songs are always the ones that cause people to go “what?”

Take Here is Our King, for instance. Tons of people thinks the songs makes no sense. But, one day, I went through DC*B’s site, and what do you know, there was a section talking about the lyrics of Here is Our King.

I also really like You Are My Joy, the self described “rock opera.” The best part was the silence before the chorus and he goes “Shhh! …The drama!” And the last song of the night, Make a Joyful Noise. “That was pretty, but we don’t want pretty. We want loud.”

Oh, and Chris Tomlin let out a new song.

For you and I are made to worship
For you and I are called to love
For you and I are forgiven and free

When you and I embrace surrender
When you and I choose to believe
You and I will see
Who we are meant to be

This morning, I had a look on Technorati and Google Blog Search for “Passion Toronto” and there are already a crapload of blogs talking about it. Talking about what this means for us. Talking about the wonderful things God is going to do in this city. Talking about uniting for His renown. How great is our God!

Tags: Christianity, passion, toronto, worship

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Christianity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.