“Surprise Theme!”: Canadian Christian Congregational Research

As I analyzed the interview transcripts, I soon realized that an unexpected theme was emerging. Most of the data collected fit nicely into the nodes that I had pre-determined by the semi-structured interview questions and the overall framework of the research project. However, something I wasn’t asking about repeatedly came up throughout the interviews. A surprise theme!

The aim of the Divine Pulse Research Project is to “take the pulse” of the Canadian church. While other researchers look at church decline and new congregations, my calling is to explore “greatness” in Canadian Christian congregations. This is a qualitative research study exploring church growth through the lens of Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” principles as outlined in his bestseller book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t (2001).

I conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with pastoral leaders across Canada, across community sizes, and across Christian faith traditions to learn what it means to be a “great” or growing church in Canada. If “greatness” is a matter of conscious choice and intention, as Collins argues, then we can identify empirically validated principles that will help set churches on a path towards numerical growth.

Along with good data directly related to the objective of the research, a surprise theme arose … ecumenism and collaboration. Since the interview questions centered about the pastoral leaders’ own congregations, I was not exploring how these various congregations interacted with and collaborated together; yet – this is what pastoral leaders talked about.

A Borrowing from Each Other’s Traditions

First, an ecumenical spirit was evident which allowed the pastoral leaders to borrow from one another’s traditions. For example, Ethan [all names mentioned here are pseudonyms] an Evangelical Protestant leader, said that he’s “lived in or studied in almost every denomination you can think of” – the Anglicans, Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, charismatics, Jesuits.

He added that he really appreciates Catholic history and is currently exploring the Orthodox tradition. At his church, they value and incorporate many of these traditions, citing liturgical expressions and reformed or expository preaching and charismatic worship. For him, this ecumenical approach “is a lot more inclusive for me and I feel more at home.”

Lane, a Pentecostal pastor, acknowledged that he knows the Pentecostal world, but that he’s also appreciated learning about different approaches to church and theology from his Anglican brothers and sisters and his Presbyterian Church of America brothers and sisters. He is Pentecostal but preaches expositionally and places heavy emphasis on the sacraments and communion, which he notes “isn’t very Pentecostal at all.”

He likes to work the Book of Common Prayer [a collection of rote prayers traditionally used by the Anglican Church] into his messages on Sunday, adding that most of their people “don’t even know what it is.” While he gladly wears his denominational label, he has appreciation for and a desire to learn from other Christian traditions.

These pastoral leaders did not lack theological conviction of their own traditions. Instead, many leaders expressed that “their denominational edge is good theology” or that “this is what we’re known for – robust theology.” There was a strong sense of conviction and appreciation for their own tradition, but it was secondary to the desire to be Christocentric and cooperative, rather than competitive. Not worried about who gets the credit, the goal is often seen as simply to serve the community, or as one leader said, “we are charged with being an outpost of Christianity.” In other words, the conviction pastoral leaders held first and foremost was a more generous understanding of the church that made denominational lines secondary.

Local Ministerial Associations

Local ministerial associations repeatedly come up as a form of collaborative effort to care for the community. A Catholic leader spoke of one of the aims of the ministerial association being to coordinate and buy gift cards “for those people that really are in need,” saying that “I think every church in town supports that program.”

A Pentecostal leader is part of “a great ministerial” with the other churches, which has a fund to cover emergency housing at a local motel and other needs that people may have. They also do food drives together – hosting it as a friendly competition between the churches to see who can collect the most food. Every church needs to have a representative on the local food bank board.

As Seth says, “there’s great unity” in regard to serving our community. A Lutheran pastor appreciates the good working relationships between the leadership of the various congregations in the area, saying that he’d like to see churches’ efforts “go into the community” rather than “working so hard” to maintain independent structures. The ministerial is represented by all the clergy and is “encouraged and supported by everyone, including lay people.”

The purpose of the ministerials is largely to serve the community. As one pastor said, the churches “can’t always agree on theology” but “we can all agree on feeding people.” His church works with other churches to host a community supper that also serves as a marker of a church holy day and raises money for the food bank.

Another church collaborated on a major music project for the community which involved over a hundred people from 30 to 40 churches. The event ran for several nights, and all the money raised was donated to a local community social service agency. Together, the pastoral leaders could accomplish more for the community. As Ben said,  it makes sense for efforts to be “combined up” and to have a “collective effort.”

The “Why” Behind the Ecumenism and Collaboration

When I asked the research participants why ecumenism and collaboration across denominational lines were important, they spoke of unity as a sort of holy witness to three audiences: The younger generations, those who have experienced church hurt, and the local community. [Coined in recent years, the term church hurt describes the emotional, physical, and psychological pain and damage caused by unhealthy church leaders, beliefs, and structures.]

An Orthodox priest said that this sort of cross-denominational conversation is needed in order to send the message of neighbourly love. For the younger generation and those who have experienced church hurt, an emphasis on loving our neighbour and unity helps mend some of the negative reputation that the church has.

Nathan saw the value of connection and collaboration with other churches particularly as a visible sign of “the church working together”. He said that people have lost trust in the church due to the hurt they’ve experienced by the church. Conflict and division have unfortunately been a big part of the story of the church which does not accurately embody the message of Jesus.

An alternate story that these pastoral leaders were embodying was that a diversity of churches is a good and often necessary thing. A pastor from the prairie provinces said that “all the churches together are on the same team” and that to become all the same would “weaken us.” He believes that the range of churches is helpful in that they help reach a range of people.

Ecumenism also provided a way for pastoral leaders to connect for mutual learning and support. Lane says he “loves sitting down with other pastors and other streams and just hearing how the Lord is at work, receiving from them and encouraging them.” He refers to this process as a sort of “ecumenical cross-pollination.”

As Stanley publicly prays for other churches during the Sunday morning service, Lane prays for the church of another denomination that he walks by on his way to church on Sunday mornings. One pastor described it as “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17). These relationships among pastoral leaders were described as encouraging and mutually educational.

Ben illustrated this desire well as he described “a few naysayers” who questioned his involvement as an Evangelical Protestant pastor with the Catholic priest or the United Church pastoral leader. His response that working together as pastoral leaders was important. He made a point to develop friendships with the other pastors, even saying that the “whole camaraderie thing of supporting one another” was important. They were “a lifeline” for each other during Covid and he attributed relationship with other local pastoral leaders as to what “kept some of us sane.”

Personal Wonderings

As a Canadian church researcher and someone who deeply loves the church, I was encouraged by this surprise theme. Particularly given our age of conflict, division, cancellation, and poor public discourse, it was heartening to discover how pastoral leaders are practically demonstrating healthy collaboration skills and promoting generative conversation. The care and concern for the local community was indeed “good news” as this speaks to the core of the gospel – love for neighbour.

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For more information on The Divine Pulse Research Project, visit: https://ciecr.wycliffecollege.ca/research/

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© Elizabeth Millar, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: provided by the author.