Sonja Free - Honorary Assistant

Sonja and her husband Bill celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary September 2009. They have three adult children, three grandchildren and a high energy dog. All of them keep Sonja and Bill very active. She enjoys reading, swimming, snowshoeing, cross country skiing and walking. She and Bill have belonged to a church bridge club for over twenty years. 

Sonja has spent most of her life in Toronto except for a year in Winnipeg in 1970.
After thirteen years of night school at York University while her children were growing up, Sonja finally graduated in 1979 with a B.A. in Psychology. In the fall of 1986 she enrolled full-time in a combined program at Wilfrid Laurier University and Waterloo Lutheran Seminary and graduated in the fall of 1991 with a Master of Divinity/Master of Social Work degree. She was called to Zion Lutheran Church April 1, 1992 and was ordained June 12, 1992. She retired from there ten years later, January 2003. Since retirement, she has served in two different congregations as Interim Pastor and was then asked to be an Honorary Assistant in the fall of 2007 at St. Matthew’s Anglican Church Islington where she had been until she and her husband moved to Innisfil mid-summer 2009.  

Sonja had served on the National Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada (ELCIC) for nine years (until summer of 2007). The last four years of which she was the Lutheran Representative to the Anglican Council of General Synod.

Her special interests and gifts lie in the areas of pastoral care, working with the elderly, women’s issues, grief work and social justice concerns such as poverty and homelessness.

A Biblical passage which speaks to her in ministry comes from Micah 6:8 “…what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”

For her, each day is a gift to be savoured and lived fully.