By Julie McGonegal (With files from Alanna Mitchell)
For many who find a spiritual home in modern Canada, the experience rarely begins beneath towering spires or inside cavernous sanctuaries. For one writer, it started in an unassuming storefront in Barrie, Ontario. It was a space modest in appearance, furnished with folding chairs and a simple kitchenette, but it possessed something increasingly rare in contemporary religious life: a place where an exhausted parent—fatigued by the specific, relentless demands of raising small children—could walk in without fanfare, sign-up sheets, or administrative hurdles, and simply belong.
Post-service potlucks stretched effortlessly into lazy Sunday afternoons, with conversations deepening as children wove between the legs of older members. The community was small, wonderfully varied, and deeply eclectic: a Ukrainian Canadian single mother raising autistic children; a Trinidadian mother homesick for her island roots; a professional clown parenting a son with autism; a midlife seminary student accompanied by his family. When the author arrived with a three-year-old daughter who has ADHD, the child was free to sing and dance with complete abandon in the aisles.
Most of these individuals would have struggled to find a comfortable fit within larger, more heavily structured congregations. That short-lived United Church plant in Barrie, known simply as “The Oasis,” embodied the highest potential of small churches: they are fundamentally relational rather than program-driven, slow rather than efficient, and organically diverse precisely because they lack the critical mass required to enforce conformity. In its miniature scale, that storefront held something vital that the wider church—designed historically for spires and grand scale—has largely forgotten and must now urgently relearn.
As The United Church of Canada navigates a profound new era of institutional life, communities like the Oasis raise pressing questions. What do small churches inherently understand about human connection, community, and genuine need that larger institutions have largely misplaced? And what might begin to flourish if the denomination stopped treating its dwindling size as a persistent problem to be solved and started recognizing it as an unexpected gift?
To fully understand this identity crisis, it helps to look backward into another kind of space—one far less intimate, built on a national vision and the ambitions of a Protestant empire.
On June 10, 1925, The United Church of Canada was officially born inside the vast expanse of the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto. Amid a sea of mostly white men, Methodists, Congregationalists, and the majority of Presbyterians merged into a single body that instantly became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The atmosphere was thick with ceremony, grand ambition, and a prevailing belief that a uniquely Canadian Protestantism could, in the words of historian Phyllis D. Airhart, "shape the soul of a nation."
It was a church conceived from its inception at a massive scale. "The founding generation wanted to grow because Canada was growing," Airhart explains. Its leaders envisioned an institution that would span the entire continent, measuring its spiritual success strictly through membership rolls, physical presence, and cultural influence.
Today, however, that foundational narrative carries heavy baggage. To speak of shaping English-speaking Canada a century ago was to imagine a nation that was uniformly white, Protestant, and deeply secure in its own righteousness—a social 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 with a very different resonance for Indigenous communities whose historic losses ran parallel to the church’s rapid institutional expansion.
Yet, Airhart notes, a quieter unease surfaced from within the denomination 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 early, heavy emphasis on money, bureaucratic structures, and massive physical buildings.
For decades, those cautionary voices were drowned out. Membership mushroomed steadily through the 1950s, peaking in the mid-1960s at more than one million adherents. The church planted itself firmly in small towns across the country, moving forward with an unspoken, confident assumption that expansion would be permanent.
Even so, some leaders sensed that something essential was drifting away. In the late 1950s, the denomination’s moderator, the Rt. Rev. Angus MacQueen, voiced deep worries that the church had grown far too comfortable and overly attached to its own organizational machinery, mistakenly treating institutional success as synonymous with the work of God. Despite booming membership lists, MacQueen warned that the church was becoming "unfit for the tasks of the hour," drifting dangerously away from the "real stuff of life."
The habits of a giant were firmly forged during those decades, and they long outlasted the bustling pews. The heavy institutional weight that still lingers in many historic sanctuaries serves as an echo of that era—a performance of bigness that has survived into a dramatically altered cultural landscape.
Today, most communities of faith no longer gather in large crowds; instead, they meet in handfuls. According to 2024 data from the United Church’s General Council office, a typical Sunday worship service now attracts an average of just 47 people.
By almost any standard, this places the average congregation squarely in the category of "small." 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, Ontario, places the upper limit closer to 150.
Regardless of the exact threshold, the trajectory is clear: a church originally built for vast breadth must now learn to live with far less of it. It must practice a form of Christian faithfulness that is thoroughly local, deeply relational, numerically modest, and ultimately untangled from the levers of cultural power.
Even at the highest levels of leadership, this uncomfortable shift is being openly addressed. The United Church’s current moderator, the Rt. Rev. Kimberly Heath, has urged the denomination to release its long-standing self-image as a "big" church and fully embrace what it has become. It is increasingly clear that the denomination is not simply shrinking, but that it is fundamentally mismatched with the broader contemporary culture.
This raises a fundamental question about what constitutes the "real stuff of life" from which the large institutional church drifted. It is surely not complex programs, sprawling real estate portfolios, or national political influence. Rather, it is found in the everyday texture of human presence—a shared meal, a quiet moment listening to a child, or a shared silence that requires no manufactured noise. It is what happens when people drop their institutional performances and simply exist together. Small churches, by sheer necessity, leave little room for bureaucracy and abundant room for the ordinary.
These congregations also return modern believers to 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.
In the storefront church of the author’s memory, relationships were dense, attentive, and participatory. Everyone contributed. When potlucks ended, people naturally migrated toward the kitchen sink, washing dishes together while conversation flowed as easily as it would after a family meal. There were no elaborate sign-up sheets or bureaucratic committees—just practical tasks carried out by whoever happened to be present.
Discipleship took a similar shape, growing organically rather than being delivered from a lofty pulpit. It took root in small groups where people spoke candidly about their doubts and their lives, in worship services where participation was open to everyone rather than reserved for the polished or professionally trained, and in informal music gatherings where song and laughter drifted through domestic kitchens on practice nights. It was a low-risk environment where people could try, stumble, and grow.
Ron Johnston has spent years observing these community dynamics. The strengths of the small church are hardly secret, having long been studied and celebrated by church thinkers across various traditions, including evangelicals. "In a small church, relationships are everything," Johnston notes. "That’s why people attend." Because interpersonal bonds are tightly knit, small congregations do not need to manufacture artificial connections; connection happens naturally.
This style of community brings a profound simplicity. Free from the rigid rules and elaborate administrative systems demanded by massive congregations, small groups can respond instantly to human need without waiting for committees or programs to authorize action. It is small-church theology in action, where success is measured not by numerical growth or physical square footage, but by steadfast faithfulness and mutual care.
This reality pushes back against a long-standing cultural inheritance—particularly prominent in evangelical and mainline Protestant traditions alike—which treats numerical growth as an undeniable sign of divine blessing and decline as personal or institutional failure. Small churches are not lesser versions of big churches. "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 are 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 divide their communities into rigid, age-segregated programs, an unexpected dynamic occurs: generations are forced to learn how to live and worship together. "They have no choice. They have to be intergenerational," Johnston says. That intentional, cross-generational care—where elders treat a neurodivergent child as one of their own—does not always happen as organically in massive, stratified institutions.
Yet observers are careful not to romanticize smallness, nor to indulge in a toxic positivity that frames decline as a purely positive development while ignoring very real material and emotional hardships. Church decline is frequently painful. Small churches struggle constantly, exhausting their few willing volunteers, watching their historic buildings crumble—or their storefront commercial rents rise—and managing increasingly tight budgets.
When growth does happen, it rarely follows expected patterns. Johnston is explicit on this point: "I am convinced that numerical growth is something that should… never be an objective in itself." Instead, the church must shift its focus away from visible, superficial markers of success and toward the slower, unglamorous work of sustaining community together.
For growth animator Greg SmithYoung, helping congregations navigate this profound identity shift is central to his work. Patient and thoughtful, he walks alongside communities undergoing this countercultural transition. While some congregations have always been small, many others experience smallness as 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. How can we keep things going?" SmithYoung observes. This manifests primarily as a resource crisis—not just financial figures on a spreadsheet, but the sheer human energy required to maintain what generations past considered standard church operations.
The Protestant work ethic, dressed up as institutional success, runs deep within the denomination. "Our church culture in the United Church, we are doers. We’re always doing things," SmithYoung notes. When pandemic restrictions temporarily halted those activities, congregations were forced to find new ways of being. The deeper strain, however, arrived later as churches attempted to return to prepandemic norms.
"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," SmithYoung says. Congregations are increasingly forced to confront a reality where they lack the fuel of money, energy, and bodies required to sustain old expectations.
The challenge, therefore, is learning how to grieve those losses well, and then imagining a healthy future with limited resources. It means doing fewer things, but doing them well—and focusing more deeply on who the community is at its core.
To illustrate this transition, Smith-Young uses a botanical metaphor. For generations, the United Church envisioned the ideal congregation as a majestic redwood or a towering pine of northern Ontario—impressive trees that announce themselves prominently on the landscape.
A few years ago, while driving around Newfoundland, Smith-Young encountered the tuckamore—an evergreen tree sculpted into a strange, horizontal shape by the fierce gales and salt spray of the Atlantic coast. At first glance, much like that modest storefront church, it looks unremarkable, its dense mat of branches hugging the rocky earth. Yet these trees are often remarkably old, clinging to life in thin soil that would kill almost anything else. A towering redwood transplanted to that same coastline would blow over within a year.
The spiritual ecosystem of Canadian culture has fundamentally shifted, Smith-Young observes. When ecosystems change, it is rarely the largest creatures that survive. "Maybe we’re being called into a time of being tuckamore trees—small, maybe not pretty, but resilient." The redwood’s health is measured in height and reach, while the tuckamore’s health is measured in endurance, adaptability, and the ability to create shelter right where it stands.
Ultimately, the storefront church that offered such profound belonging did not survive permanently; it had been funded as a ten-year experiment, and when the funding expired, the plant was folded into a larger, more traditional congregation filled with committees and fundraising dinners. Yet what that small community offered left an enduring mark.
It demonstrated that deep care does not need to be organized by vast administrative systems; it simply happens when people prioritize conversation over committees and depth over breadth. Not every church is called to be a redwood. Some, it seems, are called to be tuckamores—humble, resilient, and making shelter wherever they are planted.