Category: Announcement

Announcements made by the Toronto Oasis organizers.

Toronto Oasis Sunday meetings at our regular time (11 am) & location (569 Spadina Ave.) will resume on Sunday Jan 12th, 2020.

There will be no Toronto Oasis Sunday meeting today, Dec 22nd, and the next two Sundays Dec 29th and Jan 5th.

Toronto Oasis Sunday meetings at our regular time (11 am) & location (569 Spadina Ave.) will resume on Sunday Jan 12th, 2020.

In the meantime, check out the following:

Sunday December 22nd: Experiential Field Trip to Quaker Meeting (60 Lowther Ave.) 11:00 am – 1:00 pm. Dan Cooperstock (our Toronto Oasis treasurer) invites us to join him at the Quaker Meeting he belongs to. For more information and to RSVP go to our Meetup event at: https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/266794446/

Sunday December 29th: Toronto Oasis Visits West Hill United Church (60 Orchard Park Drive, Scarborough) 10:30 am – 12:30 pm. Like Toronto Oasis, West Hill United Church is a member of the Oasis Network. We will participate in their entirely non-theist service. For more information and to RSVP go to our Meetup event at: https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/266794383/

Friday Jan 10th: Winter Book Study at West Hill United Church (60 Orchard Park Drive, Scarborough) 7:30 pm.  The book they chose is Me, Myself, They: Life Beyond the Binary by Joshua Ferguson. They plan on meeting every other Friday beginning on January 10th. Books are available from West Hill at a discounted price of $21. For more information check out https://www.westhill.net/blog/winter-book-study and their book study blog https://whubookstudy.blogspot.com/.

Also, here is a link to the lyrics of the sing-along songs from our music director Cassie Norton:

Buy Nothing Carols Mobile

 

Contributing to Oasis

Like all organizations, it takes money to keep Toronto Oasis running! (Volunteering is also extremely helpful.) Expenses include room rentals, honorariums to musicians when we have them, and some web expenses.

We welcome donations at each Sunday event, and can even take them by credit card with the Square app on one of the leadership group’s cell phones.

You can also sign up for monthly donations to Toronto Oasis on Patreon. Go to https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4361700, then sign up to “BECOME A PATRON”. Please note that donations via Patreon are in US$. We can also set up monthly donations with the Square app.

Our thanks for any contributions of time or money!

Toronto Oasis is not currently a charitable organization, so you can’t claim these donations as tax deductions, but we are hoping to become a registered charity in the future.

Welcome to Toronto Oasis

Toronto Oasis is a community that meets regularly to create a place for freethinkers to celebrate the human experience. Each week we gather to discuss real-world principles based on reason, not tradition, which are supported by evidence, not scripture or revelation. Launching in February 2016, Toronto Oasis is fundamentally different from a church; we could be described as a freethought oasis, where we welcome all people who want to be part of a community exploring life through reason.

We are guided by core values which define our community. They shape our interactions with each other, society, and the world.

  • People are more important than beliefs.

  • Reality is known through reason.

  • Meaning comes from making a difference.

  • Human hands solve human problems.

  • Be accepting and be accepted.

Everyone is on their own journey–Agnostic, Atheist, Secular Humanist, or Questioning Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu–we look to provide a community that accepts you as you are on your journey: as long as you accept others for where they are on their journey. We aspire to be a community where people come together, celebrate the human experience, and not let faith get in the way.

Toronto Oasis meets every Sunday at 10:30 am. The community gets together to enjoy coffee, live music, and to learn something new about the world, to draw strength from the power of human community, and to engage in service projects for the betterment of the human condition. Our hope is that you leave each Sunday with a desire to reflect or make a positive change within yourself or the community at large. We invite you to join us to make new meaning in life by making a difference and doing great things.

“Regardless of theological orientation, there is some kind of deeply ingrained basic human need for community. Homo sapiens are a tribal species that need support from others; that cannot be denied.”

– Mike Aus, Executive Director, Houston Oasis

June 29 Pub Night on the Danforth!

(Catching up on past events we failed to post about:)

On June 29th, Toronto Oasis had their second pub night.  We met on the Danforth to have a pint or two and see Rick Miller and friends.  Rick was our inaugural speaker at Toronto Oasis, and his wife Stephanie Baptiste was, may we say, our most scintillating speaker to date!  Here’s a chance to see them sharing their voices in a different way, rocking to some great classic rock covers!

http://www.rickmiller.ca/trainwreck

The Varsity Magazine takes a close look at Toronto Oasis

They have the weather right, that’s for sure. The day was blustery and cold. But they also have everything else right, too, and for a magazine article about a topic as nuanced as religion and the secular, that is an amazing feat.

Thank you to Managing Editor Jaren Kerr and journalist Tom Yun for a great article exploring what Toronto Oasis is all about and why most people think of it as being Outside the Circle.

“February 12, 2017 was a Sunday. The roads were treacherous and the sidewalk was slippery. There was a snowstorm; the kind that encourages most people to stay in their homes, but that didn’t stop over 100 people from visiting U of T to talk about anything other than God.

“The first gathering — service, meeting, it’s still not decided what to call it — of the Toronto chapter of the Oasis network was held in the Koffler House Multi-Faith Centre. The Oasis network, established in the US, provides a community similar to that of a church or a mosque for the non-religious, the secular, the skeptical, and the curious.

Read more …

Toronto Oasis Launch

The Oasis Network!

At our Annual Meeting in February, the congregation voted to affiliate with the Oasis Network, a growing group of secular communities. While our affiliation will make little difference to what happens at West Hill in Scarborough, we hope it will provide inspiration and a framework for the development of new communities in other areas of the city and perhaps even further afield as the network becomes more established in Canada.

The seeds for the Oasis Network were planted in 2012, when Mike Aus, after a long process of rationalizing his Christian faith, left the congregation he had been pastoring, convinced that he could no longer lead them as a non-believer. But within a few weeks of his departure, members of his former congregation approached him about starting a community for those who were questioning traditional beliefs or who had already transitioned beyond them.

Gathering a leadership team together, Mike and a handful of other interested people worked together to create a community. They opened the doors of their rented conference facilities that September. Over a hundred people showed up and Houston Oasis was launched. Since then it has become a thriving community and a model that freethinkers in other cities have begun to emulate.

A little over a year later, Helen Stringer (that’s her in the striped top!), a life-long church goer, sat down at her computer in Kansas City and Googled “atheist church”. Finding a kindred spirit in Mike, who happily shared ideas with her, Helen, too, pulled together a leadership team, and in April 2014, launched Kansas City Oasis with over two hundred in attendance. Along the way, Helen and Mike created the Oasis Network. Its mission is to help others form their own Oasis communities by providing support, a working model, resources, and a greater community at large.

West Hill and the Oasis Network have much in common. The Oasis’ core values resonate with our VisionWorks, a document Mike immediately recognized as a fuller expression of the Oasis’ succinct, five-point list:

People are more important than beliefs.
Reality is known through reason.
Meaning comes from making a difference.
Human hands solve human problems.
Be accepting and be accepted.

There are now five active Oasis communities in the States. In addition to Houston and Kansas City, leadership teams have come together and launched communities in Boston, MA, and in Logan and Provo, Utah. Seven more teams are in the process of developing communities in other cities across the States. West Hill is both the first Canadian community to affiliate and the first existing community to do so.

There are two principles that are essential to the Oasis Network beyond its core values: collaboration and autonomy.

Each community affiliated has access to whatever learning previous communities have amassed and that can be incredibly helpful. (For example, the Network has collated their most successful practices in a comprehensive document for starting new communities.) And resources can be shared within the network. West Hill, over the past fifteen years, has been challenged to source or create resources that respect the diverse perspectives of its members; there is a dearth of material out there. Now, we will have access to materials created or used in other Oasis communities and we will share our resources with them.

As for autonomy, each community can create a style that suits their context and the people who gather. So far, most meet on Sunday mornings but one could just as easily decide that Wednesday evenings are best. West Hill, to date, is the only Oasis community that has communal singing, something that others have not introduced or found to be a barrier to participation. And before being affiliated with Oasis, our West West Hill community determined that it wanted to meet around a potluck meal. That’s the kind of autonomy Oasis expects and inspires. In other words, Oasis communities can do almost anything they want to do as long as they do it in a way that respects the core values the network has identified.

But there are a few things that Oasis communities won’t do and these are so alike West Hill that we thought them worth sharing. They won’t require adherence to a belief system or the lack of one; participants represent a wide spectrum of religious and ideological beliefs, just like West Hill. And, also just like West Hill, they won’t provide a soapbox for anti-religious rhetoric. Those who have been at one of our services or who attend regularly know that disparaging believers isn’t welcome here. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have people in our community who actively pursue the right to freedom from religion through other avenues in their lives. Gretta often speaks publicly to the need for public space that is free from religious intrusion. But our Sunday morning gatherings seek to create a barrier free space and, in order to do that, that space needs to be as comfortable for religious believers as it is for those who are not.

We’re looking forward to the collaboration that affiliation will provide and we’re excited about working with Mike, Helen, and others like them. If you have any questions about what our affiliation with the Oasis Network means, don’t hesitate to talk with a member of the Board or gretta.