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.

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

The habits of........

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