Rebuilding a Congregation
When Cheri DiNovo became the minister at Emmanuel-Howard Park United Church (now Roncesvalles United Church) in 1997, she was given a deadline. The job was to rebuild the shrinking congregation in two years, or the church would have to close.
Supported by some loyal churchgoers, she tried just about everything to attract more people, including yoga classes, a children’s performer, services with rock music, and bus shelter ads.
All to no avail. The church board’s chair observed wryly that if Jesus himself came back, they still couldn’t fill the church.
In the end, they did fill the church. It just took a different approach. Cheri recalls what happened.
Spiritual sustenance — and a meal
“I had carved out space for an evening service, and I remember thinking, we’re going to close anyway, and there’s a lot of poverty just around the corner in Parkdale. So I thought, let’s have a meal on Sunday for the people who need to eat. We’ll do an extended grace as a kind of service beforehand.
“The first meals, I literally cooked myself with no help. And then I learned about Daily Bread and Second Harvest, and more people started coming and we started making connections.
“That service grew, averaging 20 to 40 to 45 people every Sunday night. And they said they wanted a real service. A lot of them were trans or queer folk. Almost all had addiction or mental health issues. So this was my crowd — I would tell the stories about how I had lived on the street and about drugs. Those stories were stories of hope.
Along came a brilliant pianist
“We had no music to begin with because we couldn’t afford it. Then Toby Dancer arrived — the person who would later inspire my first trans rights bill when I became an MPP. I thought at first that Toby was a man, but she was a woman. She would sit off to one side, and then she started to play, and I realized she was a brilliant pianist. She started playing on Sunday nights, then became the music director for the whole church and started the gospel choir that’s still there.
“People with kids and families would wander into the evening service and see that we were actually doing something of meaning in the neighbourhood, and then they would come to the morning service. So the morning service started to grow.
“And then we introduced gospel music to the Christmas Eve service, and CBC picked that up and we filled the church — I think it was in 2001. I remember thinking it was truly a moment of grace, an absolute miracle of grace that Christmas Eve, when we first filled the church and there was standing room only. It makes me teary to think about it. It took a while, but it’s still going on.
“So that’s how it grew. My doctoral thesis was based on that experience, as well as my book, Que(er)ying Evangelism: Growing a Community from the Outside In.”