I recently posted about the dearth of church planting in Toronto. A friend challenged me to post about the challenges of planting in Toronto as well.
I decided to talk to Ezra Byer, who planted a church in Toronto between 2014 and 2019. Byer conducted over 30 interviews with Torontonians who either lead or are engaged in some form of multiethnic church planting, and has written a dissertation based on his findings. Byer now lives just outside Boise, Idaho, but continues to sense a burden for ministry in Toronto.
The Challenges of Planting in Toronto
“The pressures Toronto-based church planters encounter are enormous,” Byer writes. “Factors such as burnout, depression, and anxiety are constantly at play.”
Planters in Toronto face numerous challenges, including financial pressures, difficulty finding meeting space, transient attendees, and discouragement. Many planters — even those with larger congregations — experience a nagging feeling that they are not living up to expectations.
“Church planters within the inner city of Toronto tend to see a lesser degree of numerical impact than areas near the outskirts of the city limits,” Byer observes. As a result, they often feel comparison guilt. Many planters arrive with unrealistic expectations, which can lead to disappointment with their expectations aren’t met.
Add to this the spiritual battle that is inevitable in any church planting endeavour. “The real battle for church planters often takes place in more subtle ways and is almost always in a way the church planter could have never anticipated. It may be emotional hardship, marital stress, friendship alienation, or a sudden health crisis. When this opposition strikes, it is sometimes hard to discern between the expected stresses of planting a church and open satanic assault,” he writes.
Looking back, Byer believes that he planted with unreasonable expectations. He believed that “if God called us to a community, his blessing would cover youthful mistakes and poor strategic planning.” He underestimated the challenges and the amount of spiritual warfare they’d encounter. He sometimes felt ashamed and depressed.
Many planters in Toronto find it difficult to stay at it. They often feel like they haven’t succeeded, and their relatively small numbers mean they receive little recognition outside of their church. To outsiders, the results of their efforts appear meagre and insignificant.
The Blessings of Planting in Toronto
Despite the challenges, Byer says that planting in Toronto was also a blessing.
“There’s a closeness that you sense to God in the midst of communities that aren’t as open to him,” he says. In fact, he misses that, along with the maturing that resulted from these challenges.
“One of the reasons I loved working in Toronto is the sense of closeness to God that I didn’t experience in areas that are more Christian. There’s just a deeper level of dependence that you’re going to have to face.”
“When we go to a harder places, we experience the closeness of God that we can’t necessarily as easily discover in other places.”
Byer advises that people set reasonable expectations, build a network of relationships, and count the cost. Ministry in Toronto is still worth it despite the challenges.
Church planting in Toronto is hard, but we can learn from those who are doing it, Byer concludes. “If the tides of diversity continue their current trends in North America, lessons from church planters in multicultural regions such as Toronto can prove invaluable to other communities that may be a decade or two behind in diversification.”
Pray for church planters in Toronto. Pray that they’ll survive the challenges. Pray that God will raise up more of them. It’s difficult, and yet we need more planting in Toronto, along with the lessons that we learn from those who do it.