What small churches know

I found my church community in a storefront. It wasn’t much to look at, merely an unassuming space with folding chairs and a kitchenette. But it held something rare: a place where, without fanfare or sign-up sheets, you could arrive tired — that particular tired unique to raising small humans — and simply be folded in. Post-service potlucks stretched into lazy Sunday afternoons, conversations drifting deeper as children threaded among older members. The group was small but sundry: a Ukrainian Canadian single mother raising autistic children; a Trinidadian mother missing home; a professional clown parenting a son with autism; a midlife seminary student with his family. We came with our then three-year-old daughter, who has ADHD, and in that space she was free to dance and sing with abandon in the aisles.

Most of us wouldn’t have fit into bigger, more structured congregations. That storefront faith community — a short-lived United Church plant in Barrie, Ont., known as the Oasis — embodied what small churches at their best can be: relational rather than program-driven, slow rather than efficient, diverse because it lacked the critical mass to enforce conformity. In its smallness, it held something the wider church, built for spires and scale, had forgotten and must now relearn.

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As The United Church of Canada navigates a new era of church life, questions arise from that storefront sanctuary. What do small churches understand — about community, about human need — that larger institutions have largely lost? And what might flourish if we stopped treating smallness as a problem to be solved and started recognizing it as a gift?

I’d like to take you into another space — not a storefront with folding chairs and neurodivergent dancing kids, but something less intimate.

Picture a vast arena: mostly white men, a national vision, a Protestant empire. It was June 10, 1925, when The United Church of Canada was born at Mutual Street Arena in Toronto. Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians came together in one body that instantly became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The atmosphere held ceremony, ambition and the belief that a uniquely Canadian Protestantism could, in the words of historian Phyllis D. Airhart, “shape the soul of a nation.”

It was, from the outset, a church conceived at scale. “The founding generation wanted to grow because Canada was growing,” Airhart says. They envisioned a church that would span the country, measuring success by membership, presence and influence.

Today, that origin story reads as fraught. To speak of shaping English speaking Canada was to imagine a country that was white, Protestant, secure in its righteousness — a world structured by residential schools and assimilationist policies. Even the motto on the United Church’s crest — Ut omnes unum sint, that all may be one — lands differently for Indigenous communities whose losses ran parallel to the church’s growth.

According to Airhart, another kind of unease surfaced from within, right from the start. “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. “Too much emphasis on money, bureaucratic structure and buildings.

For a long time, though, those voices were drowned out. Membership mushroomed through the 1950s, peaking in the mid-1960s at over a million. The church planted itself in small towns across the country, moving forward with the unspoken confidence it would keep on expanding.

And yet, some sensed something was amiss. The moderator in the late 1950s, Rt. Rev. Angus MacQueen, worried that the denomination had become too comfortable, too attached to its own structures, mistaking institutional success for the work of God. The concern, he said, was that the church, despite its booming membership rolls, was becoming “unfit for the tasks of the hour,” drifting away from the “real stuff of life.”

In a church, relationships are everything. That’s why people attend.

The habits of a giant were being formed in those years, and eventually, they outlived the bustling pews. One wonders if the institutional weight that lingers in some sanctuaries is the long echo of that era: a performance of bigness that has survived into a much different time. Most communities of faith no longer gather in large numbers; they meet, instead, 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 most measures, this meets the definition of small. Rev. Greg SmithYoung, a growth animator with the General Council office, characterizes a small church as “under 50 in your regular Sunday crowd,” while Rev. Ron Johnston, executive director of Small Church Connections in Elmira, Ont., sets the upper limit nearer to 150. The exact threshold matters less than the trajectory it reveals: a church built for breadth must now learn to live with less of it — to practise a form of faithfulness that is local, relational and numerically modest, and perhaps, in time, less entangled with the accommodations of cultural power.

Even at the highest levels of leadership, that shift is being named. The United Church’s current moderator, Rt. Rev. Kimberly Heath, has urged the denomination to let go of its long – standing self-image as a “big” church and embrace what it now is: small. What is becoming clear isn’t just that the United Church is shrinking, but that it’s increasingly mismatched with the culture it inhabits.

So what, then, is the “real stuff of life” from which the big church has drifted? It’s presumably not programs or buildings or national influence. If I were to venture a guess, it’s the everyday texture of human presence — a meal shared, a child listened to, a silence that doesn’t need filling. It’s what happens when people stop performing institution and start simply being together. Small churches, by necessity, have less room for bureaucracy and more room for the ordinary.

They also return us to the beauty of a biblical promise: that where two or three are gathered, the divine is there among us. It takes so very few to notice God.

That storefront church I described? That was the real stuff of life. When I think back to what made it work, I realize the relationships were dense and attentive. Everyone contributed. After those potlucks, people drifted toward the sink, washing dishes together, the conversation flowing the way it does after a family meal. There was no sign-up sheet or committee, just what needed doing — done by whoever was there.

Discipleship, too, took that shape. It wasn’t something delivered from the pulpit so much as something that grew among us: in small groups, where people spoke freely about their faith and their lives; in worship, where participation wasn’t reserved for the polished or the trained; and in a music group, where song, conversation and laughter wafted through my kitchen on practice nights. Whatever we did, that church plant was a low-risk place to try, to falter and to grow.

Johnston has spent years watching these dynamics. The strengths of the small church aren’t secrets. They’ve been documented and celebrated, often by evangelicals such as himself who have been thinking about congregations for a long time. “In a small church, relationships are everything,” he says. “That’s why people attend.” Because relationships are so tight-knit, the small church doesn’t need to manufacture connection — it just happens.

That kind of smallness brings simplicity. Without the hard rules and elaborate systems larger congregations require, there’s a chance to respond to need without waiting for committees or programs to tell you how. It’s small church theology in action: success measured not by numbers or buildings but by faithfulness and relationships.

It also pushes against a long inheritance — especially pronounced in evangelical traditions — in which growth is taken as a sign of blessing, decline as a kind of failure. Small churches aren’t lesser 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,’” says Johnston. “There’s a lot of things you can do better in a small church than you can in a large one.”

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When there are not enough people to separate worship or congregational life into age-specific activities, something unexpected happens: generations learn to be together. “They have no choice. They have to be intergenerational,” says Johnston. I think back to the way elders treated my daughter — like she was one of their own. That kind of intentional, cross-generational care doesn’t always happen as easily in larger churches.

None of this is to romanticize smallness, however. Nor is it to engage in a kind of denialism or toxic positivity that flips the script on decline while ignoring material or emotional realities. Church decline is painful — period. Small churches struggle, exhaust their few willing volunteers, watch their buildings crumble (or their storefront rents rise) and their budgets shrink.

Growth, when it comes, may not show up in the ways we expect. Johnston is careful here: “I am convinced that numerical growth is something that should…never be an objective in itself,” he says.

In other words, we need to shift away from the visible markers of success and toward something deeper and harder to measure: the slow, unglamorous work of being church together.

Unlearning a culture-wide obsession with institutional success is gruelling work. Helping churches navigate this profound identity shift is the focus of growth animator Smith-Young. Thoughtful and patient, with something of a psychologist-in- residence quality about him, he walks alongside communities in the midst of this countercultural transition.

Some congregations have always been small, he says. But for many, smallness is the 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?”

He thinks of it broadly as a crisis of resources. “Whether it’s financial is often the easiest to see. It’s numbers on a page. But also, just the energy of people. Fewer people to do what they consider to be what a healthy congregation does.”

That expectation — of what a healthy congregation does — runs deep. Think of it as the Protestant work ethic dressed up as success. “Our church culture in the United Church, we are doers. We’re always doing things,” he says.

When the pandemic took that ability away, congregations had to find a different way of being. The real strain, though, came later. “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,” Smith-Young says. “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 question isn’t how to escape that grief but how to move through it. “How do we grieve that well?” he asks. “And then how do we find and imagine being church as a small church that doesn’t have a lot of resources, but can still be healthy, can still flourish? Maybe it isn’t doing everything that it used to do, but is doing what it does well, and is even more so being who it is well.”

What that shift looks like, he suggests, is rarely dramatic. Congregations don’t wake up one day having embraced smallness as a gift. More often, the change begins with letting go — of programs they can no longer sustain, of expectations formed in another era — and discovering, almost by accident, that something different, yet still enough, has taken root in their place. The grief doesn’t disappear, but it shifts its weight. What remains is a different kind of attentiveness: to who is actually there, to what is still possible, to forms of faithfulness that don’t depend on scale.

For Smith-Young, small churches today are also learning to be church in a world that no longer guarantees them a place — learning to take root in thin soil, to grow where they can, to make shelter where they are. That work, he suggests, involves a different understanding of health altogether.

Small churches are learning to be church in a world that no longer guarantees them a place — to take root in thin soil, to grow where they can, to make shelter where they are.

He has been playing with a metaphor. For years, he says, the United Church has pictured the ideal congregation as a certain kind of tree — a redwood, maybe, or the tall pines of northern Ontario. Majestic and towering, it was the kind of tree you look up to, that announces itself on the landscape.

A few years ago, Smith-Young and his spouse drove around Newfoundland. That’s where he discovered the tuckamore — an evergreen tree sculpted into a strange, stunted shape by the Atlantic coast’s constant gales and salt spray. At first glance, much like that storefront church, it’s not much to look at. It grows horizontally, not vertically, its dense mat of branches hugging the rock. “I thought, ‘What an ugly little tree. Put it out of its misery,’” SmithYoung says.

But he learned that these trees are often very old. They hang on for dear life in thin soil, thriving in an environment that would kill almost anything else. Transplant a redwood to that coastline and it would blow over in a year.

The spiritual ecosystem of Canadian culture has shifted, Smith-Young observes. When ecosystems change, it isn’t the biggest creatures that survive. Sixty-five million years ago, it was the small ones — the ones that required less fuel, less energy, less of everything — that made it through. We are conditioned to admire the towering and the majestic, to conflate grandness with godliness. “But maybe we’re being called into a time of being tuckamore trees — small, maybe not pretty, but resilient.”

This is the shift Smith-Young is inviting the United Church to consider: not from big to small as a concession, but from one understanding of health to another. The redwood’s health is measured in height, in reach, in sheer mass. The tuckamore’s health is measured in something else — its ability to endure, to adapt, to create shelter exactly where it is. “Small is resilient,” he says. “Small organizations adapt easier to stress and change than big organizations.”

What, then, does “growth” mean now? Is it still something that can be counted — or is it something being discerned in relationships, in depth, in the slow work of presence? The word still circulates in church bureaucracy, yet what it names may be shifting.

My storefront church didn’t survive. It had been funded as a 10-year experiment, and when the funding ended, it did too. Eventually that wee plant was folded into a bigger, more traditional church full of committees and fundraising dinners. Several years later, I still miss it.

Just once, at the bigger church, I bumped into the professional clown. She was near the altar, trying to keep her son and his new sibling sorted as Sunday school kids gathered for a structured lesson. She told me her friends were shocked she even went to church. She’d say hers — meaning the storefront, not this place — wasn’t a regular church at all. I didn’t see her again in those pews.

What that small church offered didn’t transfer easily. It depended on an ecology — of people, of need and of scale. Remove those conditions, and something essential disappears. What endures, though, is the memory of a community where being seen was ordinary, and care wasn’t something to be organized but something that simply happened. Those things can take root wherever people are willing to be small together — wherever they choose to prioritize a conversation over a committee, depth over breadth.

Not every church has to be a redwood. Some are called to be tuckamores: humble, resilient, making shelter where they are.

***

Julie McGonegal is a journalist in Elora, Ont. With files from Alanna Mitchell.

This article first appeared in Broadview’s September/October 2026 issue titled “Called to be small.”

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