Small but mighty...
Alive is beautiful...
Sorry for the late post!
This week and last, I’m on the coast of BC. Last week I did a writing retreat at the beautiful Nimmo Bay Resort as a writer in their artist in residence program. I’m working from my folks’ home in my Alert Bay this week. Which meant I had the change to worship with them at the Shared Anglican United Fellowship at St. John Gaulbert Church, otherwise known as the A-Frame Church.
Because the ferry from Alert Bay to Port McNeill means that we arrive in town nearly an hour before church starts, I got a chance to connect with the regulars; dedicated lay leaders who gather to ensure that church happens. I also got to crawl up into the balcony through the trifold drop-down attic ladder to retrieve the Pentecost banner to hang it in the chancel.
Like many Sundays, the congregation relied on a recorded sermon from the Together We Worship resource, created by my dear friend Allan Buckingham. Allan is a lay leader at the United Church community of faith in Banff, AB. They started Together We Worship for congregations who couldn’t afford, or were having a hard time recruiting paid ministry personnel. “All you need is someone willing to read from the leader’s sheet and a way for people to see and hear the video sermon.”1
The A-Frame falls into the former category. It has been several years since they’ve been able to afford a paid minister (2012). But that doesn’t mean ministry doesn’t happen here. They will either use “Together We Worship” or sometimes have pulpit supply. In addition to coffee before church, there is also a potluck lunch every week. And that’s just on Sundays.
This small but mighty little church provides significant outreach and food security ministry in the community (including one hot lunch and a food bank program called Fishes & Loaves). A quick look at an old calendar shows just how busy they are:
The bookstore is one of the primary forms of income for the church; its revenues cover the operations of the building, including repairs & maintenance, utilities, and cleaning staff. All from an “Any book for $2” pricing scheme. And these are not the dregs of someone’s estate sale. There’s an excellent combination of local history, general nonfiction, contemporary cook books, kids books, popular series like Heartstopper, and shelves of page-turners by Patterson, Koontz, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler, as well as literary fiction. If we were in Toronto I easily could have left with 2 boxes of books. And once read, I would happily donate them back to the church for resale (which, I suspect) is what often happens.
When my parents started going back to church, years after they’d moved back to the North Island region, there were 4-8 people attending Sunday services. Today there were 18 people, including 3 children under the age of 5. And we were missing Deborah, the matriarch of the congregation (who also serves as local justice of the peace and presided at 4 weddings this weekend), as well as another young family with several children.
For years while I was moderator, I often preached a sermon entitled “Alive is Beautiful” (a phrase I’m sure I’ve posted about here before). Inspired by Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand’s book When Church Stops Working, each version of the sermon includes a quote that urges us to think about what marks success in a community of faith is not the numbers, but whether or not it feels alive. That book is based on a more academic study by Root called Churches and the Crisis of Decline. Root writes: “what makes a congregation beautiful is its life, not its numbers, programs, or access to resources. A community that is alive is beautiful, whether six or six hundred.”2
I certainly get that sense at the A-Frame.
I’ve also been digging into Brandon O’Brien’s revised edition of The Strategically Small Church: Intimate, Nimble, Authentic & Effective. While I haven’t finished it, the first third of the book impresses upon us the fact that small congregations can have outsized impacts, and their size allows for more effective community building and community response than large congregations.
This is definitely true at the A-Frame. Their grounds boast a beautiful community garden staffed by a paid gardener; the bookstore is also volunteer-run and community lunch programs are nearly completely community-run with some organizers paid modest honoraria. About 600 people per month comes through the church itself. And this is just the stuff I know about - someone promised to send me a full list of their activities tomorrow.
While there might be only 10-20 ‘active participants’ in Sunday worship on any given week, this is not how members see their ministry. Sunday worship is meaningful for those who participate, but they are clear their ministry is happening every day of the week. Last week there were over 80 people attending the hot lunch. The church feels alive and busy. It’s clean and well cared-for. Alive is beautiful.
As we read in the Pentecost reading from the Gospel of John today (John 20:19-23), the early church kept gathering when it was a handful of frightened people in an upper room. The question before us — before every community of faith that feels the ground shifting beneath its feet — is not whether we are large enough or funded enough or culturally relevant enough. It is whether we are alive enough to keep expecting God to show up.
Stories like this one remind me that we are.
https://www.togetherweworship.ca/about-together-we-worship, accessed May 24, 2026.
Andrew Root, Churches & the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (Baker Academic, 2022) p. 6.
And they have bees! Sweet Honey of the Rock, indeed!
Beautiful church - awesome congregation! They have more going for them than many larger parishes.