When Michael Chhangur told his neighbor he was a pastor, he was met with a blank stare.
“He just looked at me confused, like, ‘What’s that?’” said Chhangur.
Chhangur has seen this reaction often since he and his family moved to Halifax, the capital of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, in 2019 to plant Christ Church Halifax. Services began in October 2021. Now, nearly 100 people meet each Sunday in the city’s downtown. Many have no previous church background, let alone familiarity with the PCA or Reformed theology.
Chhangur describes the growth as miraculous. Few church plants survive in Nova Scotia, or in the other Atlantic Canada provinces: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
In general, the region is spiritually burnt out, said Chhangur, possibly owing to scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Many people weren’t raised in the church, so, like his neighbor, they have little context for what pastors do or what churches are.
“It’s very much frontier evangelism in a lot of places,” said Chhangur, who was a pastoral intern at Resurrection Church in Ottawa, Ontario, before coming to Halifax.
Chhangur and the rest of the Eastern Canada Presbytery hope to see more churches planted on this frontier. The presbytery’s goal is to double its size in the next 10 years, part of Mission to North America’s vision to increase the number of PCA congregations in the U.S. and Canada from 1,932 to 3,000 congregations by 2033.
The plan is ambitious. The presbytery has 17 churches and five mission churches. Its goal is to start five or six churches from scratch and plant another 10 to 12 daughter churches. Pastors and church planters say church multiplication can only happen through collaboration – both within the presbytery and the denomination.
Recruiting Within and Beyond a Vast Area
The presbytery is growing. A new mission church was established in 2024. Two others opened in 2023. Specific churches have momentum, but doubling the presbytery requires a team approach.
“Our presbytery, like a lot of presbyteries, is struggling to understand what it means to work together to plant churches,” said Kyle Hackmann, pastor at Christ Church Toronto in Ontario. “We cover such a vast region that what happens in one part of our presbytery is almost unknown to other members of the presbytery.”
“Vast” is an understatement. Canada’s 3.9 million square miles break down into just two presbyteries. The Eastern Canada Presbytery spans six Canadian provinces: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. This includes Canada’s most populous province – Ontario, with just over 16 million residents – and its least – Prince Edward Island, with just under 180,000 residents.
The presbytery wants to plant a church in each of these provinces. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador have no PCA churches.
Doubling the presbytery means encouraging pastors and church members to think beyond their cities and their provinces.
Churches naturally think about planting churches close by, said Hackmann. He knows. He served at Grace Toronto, in the downtown of Canada’s most populous city, before planting Christ Church in the city’s east end. The Greater Toronto Area needs more churches, he said. But he also knows he needs to encourage his members to think about planting churches outside Ontario.
“We’re trying our best to see this area as our collective mission field as a larger body of churches,” Hackmann said.
Like any mission field, it needs workers. The presbytery is looking to recruit church planters from Canada and the U.S.
“Canada affords a unique opportunity,” said Hackmann, who was under care of and licensed in Chicago Metro Presbytery and moved to Toronto in 2010. While Canada is more secular than the U.S., the two countries share a common language and many similar cultural practices. Canadian pastors are eager to help other pastors come to Canada, Hackmann said. He thinks American seminary students would benefit from serving in Canada, as would young pastors. Cooperation between pastors in both countries “would only make the PCA stronger as a whole,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous need.”
A French Church for Quebec
One of the neediest areas is Quebec, widely considered Canada’s least evangelized province. The PCA has one church there: Grace Gatineau, a mission church planted in 2023. The presbytery’s goal is to plant a French-speaking Quebec church.
Protestant churches have always been sparse in the historically Catholic, predominantly French province. But since the 1960s, Quebec has deliberately severed its religious ties. For example, it is illegal for Quebec government employees – including teachers – to wear religious symbols at work.
It’s a far cry from Christian-saturated Mississippi where Franky Garcia, Grace’s pastor, was raised.
“Moving here, I felt like I went from being the hero to being the villain in society,” he said.
Grace’s growth has come amidst opposition. Quebec offers lessons for pastors in other post-Christian contexts.
“The more we minister here, the more we’ll learn about how to face the changing tides,” said Garcia.
There are signs of interest. Presbyterianism has often been lumped in with Catholicism, says Luke Bert, a PCA elder who teaches at a French, Baptist seminary in Quebec. But he sees rising interest. Around 400 people attended the launch last year of the French version of the Reformation Study Bible. A joint project of Ligonier ministries and Publications Chrétiennes, the study Bible contains all the study materials in the English Reformation Study Bible translated into French.
“Reformed theology, covenant theology is something that’s really appealing to Quebecers,” Bert said. “I think that French Canadians are very interested in it.”
Still, they need a French church. Grace is an English church with many French-speaking attendees. Services are bilingual; sermons are translated live into French.
Finding a bilingual or Francophone Reformed pastor ready to church plant is hard. The presbytery will have to learn to support French-speaking pastors and examine Francophone pastoral candidates who may struggle to preach their trial sermons in English, said Bert.
“We need to be very strategic about not only providing resources [to French pastors], but also walking hand-in-hand with French-speaking Christians and bilingual Christians, training them up to the point that we can have good, strong French churches,” he said.
Francophone Christians are already a key resource for the church, said Garcia.
“We listen a lot to the Francophones, because many of the Francophone Christians have been ministering in a world that is very different from the English speakers,” he said. “They’ve learned a lot. We listen, and we encourage.”
Planting with Creativity
Other presbytery churches may provide inspiration for recruiting new church planters. Phil Tadros pastors Sojourn Community Church in Stoney Creek, Ontario. Once its own municipality, Stoney Creek is a neighborhood in the east end of Hamilton, a city of about 600,000. This part of the city often got overlooked in church planting, said Tadros. He doesn’t know of any other Reformed churches in the area.
Sojourn launched in September 2024. By December, close to 60 adults, plus children, attended weekly.
Tadros is fairly new to pastoral ministry. He started pastoring in 2023, joining New City Hamilton with the goal of church planting. He admits he wasn’t the typical church planting candidate: he was married with four kids and an established career as a freight pilot. He’s now a bivocational pastor, flying seven or eight days a month.
Tadros appreciates the PCA’s emphasis on urban centers but says the denomination must remember small and medium-sized cities.
“There’s still a lot of people who aren’t ministered to and don’t have a lot of [biblically faithful] churches,” he said. “We want to go where there is less gospel presence.”
Sojourn already has a pastoral resident and is dreaming of where and when to plant a church. But Tadros thinks the presbytery should consider different types of church planters, perhaps those who are older or have ministry experience and established careers, but don’t have formal theological training. The presbytery should think about sending teams of church members, perhaps one or two couples, with ordained ministers to help plant churches in cities further away from the sending church.
“I think we need to be creative about how we recruit and how we approach church planting if we are really serious about doubling the size of our presbytery,” he said.
But he’s excited to see growth.
“There’s just so much that needs to happen that only God can do for this to become reality,” he said. “But we can dream. We can cast that vision.”
Meagan Gillmore is a journalist in Ottawa, Ontario, where she attends Resurrection Church.