By Julie McGonegal (With files from Alanna Mitchell)
The church community arrived without fanfare, sign-up sheets, or a sprawling architectural legacy. It occupied an unassuming storefront space in Barrie, Ont., complete with folding chairs and a humble kitchenette. Yet, it possessed something increasingly rare in modern religious life: a sanctuary where exhausted parents—particularly those weathering the unique fatigue of raising small children—could simply walk in and be folded into a community.
Post-service potlucks routinely stretched into lazy Sunday afternoons, with conversations drifting into deeper waters as young children wove safely among older members. The congregation was small but remarkably diverse. It included a Ukrainian Canadian single mother raising autistic children, a Trinidadian mother homesick for her island roots, a professional clown parenting a son with autism, and a midlife seminary student accompanied by his family.
For one journalist and her family, who arrived with a then three-year-old daughter diagnosed with ADHD, the storefront offered a rare gift: the freedom for a child to dance and sing with uninhibited abandon down the aisles.
Most members of this short-lived United Church plant, known as the Oasis, would have struggled to find a spiritual home within larger, highly structured congregations. The storefront embodied the very best of small-church dynamics: it was relational rather than program-driven, slow rather than hyper-efficient, and organically diverse simply because it lacked the critical mass required to enforce conformity. In its miniature scale, it preserved an intimate essence that the wider church—long constructed for soaring spires and massive institutional scale—had largely forgotten and must now urgently relearn.
As The United Church of Canada navigates a profound new era of institutional life, the legacy of that storefront sanctuary prompts searching questions. What do small churches inherently understand about human need and true community that larger organizations have lost? And what might spiritually flourish if the denomination stopped treating smallness as a crisis to be solved, and instead recognized it as a profound gift?
A History Built at Scale
To understand the weight of this transition, it helps to examine the institutional architecture of the past.
Picture a vast arena filled mostly by white men, bound by a national vision and a sprawling Protestant empire. On June 10, 1925, The United Church of Canada was officially born at the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto. Methodists, Congregationalists, and the majority of Presbyterians merged into a single body that instantly established itself as the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The atmosphere was charged with ceremony, ambition, and the fervent belief that a uniquely Canadian Protestantism could "shape the soul of a nation," as historian Phyllis D. Airhart notes.
From its inception, the church was conceived on a massive scale. "The founding generation wanted to grow because Canada was growing," Airhart explains. Early leaders envisioned a nationwide presence, measuring their success through membership rolls, physical infrastructure, and cultural influence.
Today, however, that origin story carries heavy complications. To speak of shaping English-speaking Canada a century ago was to imagine a nation that was predominantly white, Protestant, and secure in its cultural dominance—a world structured by residential schools and aggressive assimilationist policies. Even the Latin motto emblazoned on the United Church’s crest—Ut omnes unum sint ("That all may be one")—lands differently for Indigenous communities whose historic losses ran parallel to the denomination’s rapid expansion.
Airhart notes that a different kind of unease also surfaced from within the church right from the beginning. "Even some of the most ardent supporters of church union were frustrated by the model of church administration that the United Church had adopted," she says, pointing to an excessive emphasis on money, bureaucratic structures, and large buildings.
For decades, those cautionary voices were drowned out. Membership mushroomed through the post-war boom of the 1950s, ultimately peaking in the mid-1960s with over a million adherents. The church planted roots in small towns across the country, fueled by the unspoken confidence that its expansion would continue indefinitely.
Yet, prescient leaders sensed trouble beneath the surface. In the late 1950s, the denomination’s moderator, Rt. Rev. Angus MacQueen, warned that the church had grown too comfortable and overly attached to its own bureaucracy, mistakenly equating institutional success with the active work of God. Despite booming membership rolls, MacQueen feared the church was becoming "unfit foralities of the hour" and drifting away from the "real stuff of life."
The Reality of Modern Congregations
The institutional habits formed during that era outlived the bustling pews. The heavy administrative weight lingering in some modern sanctuaries serves as a long echo of the past—a performance of bigness that has survived into a dramatically changed cultural landscape.
Today, most faith communities no longer gather in large numbers. Instead, they meet in handfuls. According to 2024 data from the United Church’s General Council office, a typical Sunday worship service attracts an average of just 47 people.
By any objective standard, this meets the definition of a small church. Rev. Greg SmithYoung, a growth animator with the General Council office, characterizes a small church as one with "under 50 in your regular Sunday crowd," while Rev. Ron Johnston, executive director of Small Church Connections in Elmira, Ont., sets the upper limit closer to 150.
Regardless of the precise numerical threshold, the trajectory is clear: a church built for broad cultural reach must now learn to live with a smaller footprint. It must practice a form of faithfulness that is intensely local, relational, and numerically modest—and, ultimately, far less entangled with the levers of cultural power.
Even at the highest levels of leadership, this shift is being openly addressed. The current moderator of The United Church of Canada, Rt. Rev. Kimberly Heath, has urged the denomination to release its long-standing self-image as a "big" church and fully embrace its current reality. It is increasingly clear that the United Church is not merely shrinking, but that it is structurally mismatched with the contemporary culture it inhabits.
So what constitutes the "real stuff of life" from which the large institutional church has drifted? It is presumably not administrative programs, real estate portfolios, or national political influence. Rather, it is found in the everyday texture of human presence—a shared meal, a patient ear turned toward a child, or a shared silence that requires no manufactured noise. It is what happens when people stop performing institutional roles and simply focus on being together. By absolute necessity, small churches leave less room for bureaucracy and far more room for the ordinary.
Small congregations also ground their communities in a foundational biblical promise: that where two or three are gathered, the divine is present. It takes remarkably few people to notice the sacred in everyday life.
The Dynamics of Intimate Community
Reflecting on the storefront church plant in Barrie reveals why these intimate spaces succeed when relationships are dense and attentive. Everyone contributes organically. After potlucks, members naturally gravitated toward the sink to wash dishes together, conversation flowing as it would following a family meal. There were no elaborate sign-up sheets or standing committees—just necessary work performed by whoever happened to be present.
Discipleship took a similarly organic shape. It was rarely delivered downward from a pulpit; instead, it grew horizontally among members in small groups where people spoke freely about their faith and struggles. Worship participation was not restricted to the polished or professionally trained, and music and laughter drifted easily through living rooms during practice nights. It was a low-risk environment where people could try, stumble, and grow together.
Johnston, who has spent years analyzing these dynamics, points out that the strengths of the small church are well-documented, particularly within evangelical traditions that have studied congregational health extensively. "In a small church, relationships are everything," he says. "That’s why people attend." Because interpersonal connections are tight-knit, a small church has no need to manufacture community—it simply happens as a byproduct of gathering.
This brand of smallness introduces a welcome simplicity. Free from the rigid rules and elaborate systems required by mega-churches, small congregations can respond to immediate community needs without waiting for committee approvals or official programming. It is small-church theology in active motion, where success is measured not by financial ledgers or building sizes, but by relational faithfulness.
This perspective challenges a long-standing cultural inheritance—particularly prominent in North American Protestantism—that automatically equates numerical growth with divine blessing and decline with moral or spiritual failure. Small churches are not lesser iterations of the faith. "There’s one sentence that I won’t allow anyone to get away with saying in my presence, and that is, ‘We’re just a small church,’" Johnston insists. "There’s a lot of things you can do better in a small church than you can in a large one."
When congregations lack the numbers to segregate their communities into rigid, age-specific silos, something unexpected occurs: generations are forced to learn how to inhabit the same space. "They have no choice. They have to be intergenerational," Johnston notes. That intentional, cross-generational care—where elders treat a member’s child as their own—is notoriously difficult to manufacture in larger, compartmentalized settings.
Navigating Grief and the "Tuckamore" Metaphor
At the same time, experts caution against the romanticization of smallness. Denominational decline is painful, and ignoring material or emotional realities through toxic positivity serves no one. Small churches frequently struggle, exhausting their limited pools of willing volunteers while watching their buildings crumble, their storefront rents rise, and their financial budgets shrink.
Numerical growth, when it occasionally happens, should never be treated as an organizational objective in its own right, Johnston argues. Instead, communities must shift their focus away from visible, corporate markers of success and toward the slow, unglamorous work of simply being the church together.
Guiding congregations through this profound identity shift is the daily work of Smith-Young. Thoughtful and patient, he walks alongside communities navigating a countercultural transition. While some congregations have always been small, for many others, smallness represents the painful residue of bigness.
"For them, it’s an adaptation to smallness that has a strong sense of loss to it, and also a sense of crisis," Smith-Young says. "How can we keep things going?"
This crisis often manifests as a strain on resources—not just finances, which are easily tracked as numbers on a page, but human energy. Fewer active members remain to carry out the traditional expectations of what a healthy congregation is supposed to do.
"Our church culture in the United Church, we are doers. We’re always doing things," Smith-Young observes. When the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted those activities, congregations were forced to find alternative ways of being. The deeper strain, however, emerged as communities attempted a return to normalcy.
"We started returning to normal… but my goodness, we’ve lost some people, and we’ve all aged more than on the calendar because of the stress of the pandemic. We don’t have the energy anymore," he explains. "We have this picture of what a healthy congregation does, which requires fuel—of money, of energy, of people. But more and more congregations are being forced into a reality."
The path forward, Smith-Young suggests, requires moving through grief rather than attempting to bypass it. Congregations must learn to ask how they can grieve well, and then imagine a future as small churches that operate with fewer resources while remaining healthy and flourishing. Success may no longer mean doing everything the church once did, but rather doing what remains exceptionally well, and more deeply embodying who they are.
To illustrate this paradigm shift, Smith-Young employs a botanical metaphor. For generations, the United Church envisioned the ideal congregation as a majestic redwood or a towering pine of northern Ontario—a towering presence that announces itself prominently on the landscape.
However, during a drive around Newfoundland, Smith-Young encountered the tuckamore—an evergreen tree sculpted into a strange, horizontal, stunted shape by the relentless Atlantic gales and salt spray. At first glance, much like a humble storefront church, it appears unassuming, its dense mat of branches hugging the coastal rock.
Yet these trees are often remarkably old, surviving in thin soil and environments that would destroy almost any other plant. A towering redwood transplanted to that same coastline would blow over within a year.
As the spiritual ecosystem of Canadian culture shifts, Smith-Young observes that survival belongs not to the biggest creatures, but to the adaptable. "We are conditioned to admire the towering and the majestic, to conflate grandness with godliness," he notes. "But maybe we’re being called into a time of being tuckamore trees—small, maybe not pretty, but resilient."
The health of a redwood is measured in height and mass; the health of a tuckamore is measured in its capacity to endure, adapt, and create shelter precisely where it is rooted. "Small is resilient," Smith-Young says. "Small organizations adapt easier to stress and change than big organizations."
A Lasting Legacy
The storefront church in Barrie ultimately did not survive permanently. Funded as a ten-year experimental plant, it dissolved when its initial funding ran dry, and the congregation was eventually absorbed into a larger, more traditional church governed by committees and fundraising dinners.
Yet, the impact of that intimate space endures in the memories of those who attended. What that small church offered could not be easily packaged or transferred, as it depended entirely on a delicate ecology of people, shared vulnerability, and scale.
When those conditions are removed, something essential is lost. But what remains is the lingering memory of a community where being genuinely seen was ordinary, and where care was not an administrative program to be organized, but a reflex that simply happened. Those qualities can take root wherever people are willing to be small together—and wherever they choose to prioritize human connection over bureaucracy, and depth over breadth.
Not every church, it turns out, needs to be a redwood. Some are called to be tuckamores: humble, resilient, and quietly making shelter right where they stand.