When the huge new building was finished, nobody in the Chicago area thought it looked like a church. On the outside it looked like a convention hall, on the inside like a 5,000-seat theatre. And what went on inside didn't seem much like church either. The first thing visitors noticed was the music, which was lively, contemporary, and professional.

On any given Sunday the audience was as likely to see a play as hear a sermon. And then there was the preacher——dressed in ordinary clothes, he was breezy and compelling; by turns funny and serious; and always utterly irresistible. Critics sniffed that this was entertainment, not worship. Truth be told, it was entertaining. The thousands of casually dressed people who jammed the parking lot and streamed into the building looked less like churchgoers and more like Cubs fans headed for Wrigley Field.

And what happened on Sunday was only the sauerkraut on the kielbasa. The rest of the week dozens of paid staff and even more volunteers organized media productions, prayer services, men's and women's groups, boys' and girls' clubs, summer camps, and food programs for the needy.

They operated a 100-seat restaurant inside the church building, supported dozens of missionary agencies, and ran an extensive small-group ministry that spread throughout the Chicago area.

The idea behind all this was to create a new kind of nondenominational church that would use an interesting program and comfortable surroundings to draw in the unchurched. Once drawn in, they would be enveloped in a comprehensive network of activities designed to give them a supportive community and deeper instruction in the Christian faith. This approach was so successful in Chicago that it immediately spawned a host of imitators in many parts of the country, who then formed an association of like-minded churches to strengthen and spread the movement.

Willow Creek? Nope. This is a description of Paul Rader's Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Built in 1922, the church drew massive crowds for a decade afterward.¹

The Tabernacle movement grew out of the Billy Sunday meetings but became a movement under Paul Rader, second president of The Christian and Missionary Alliance. Rader sent out three planting teams, and soon the concept swept across the States and through Canada. Today, churches such as Peoples Church in Toronto, Philpott Memorial Church in Hamilton, and in the C&MA Beulah in Edmonton, Tenth Avenue in Vancouver and many others, including the church I pastored in Owen Sound Ontario, are rooted in the tabernacle movement. The movement had these characteristics.

The tabernacles were missional in that they were evangelistic to those in their community, and stressed missions around the world.

They were innovative in method and leader driven. As a result, they had high success in evangelism, especially among the working class.² Almost eighty years later, many of these churches continue to be large and to exert powerful redemptive influence on their communities and around the world.

I believe that in some ways the tabernacles hark back to the cathedrals of the middle ages. The cathedrals were churches that served not only as places of worship, but as signs to their cities and surrounding countryside of the presence of a believing community. They were places from which flowed teaching and care for the poor. Their clergy had influence – very real influence – on the social, intellectual and political spheres of their cities.

As well the tabernacles, like today’s mega-churches, were centres for the creative generation of methods and means of doing evangelism and ministry. The old cathedrals promoted art and music; the tabernacles pioneered music as part of evangelism and began to use drama, and the large churches of today have moved into a variety of aggressive evangelistic and ministry methods.

The tabs, as some used to call them, became church planting centres. At one point there were three hundred C&MA tabernacles, and connected to them were what we then called branches. As pointed out before, many of these became the churches that we know today by different names, and tabernacles such as Beulah in Edmonton and Tenth Avenue in Vancouver were like Maple trees, casting seeds out to surrounding fields. Today, many of the Alliance churches in the lower mainland and in northern Alberta trace their lineage back to those life giving tabernacles.

Finally, cathedral churches can and are reaching out to their surrounding communities in social and justice issues. From A.B. Simpson’s Gospel Tabernacle came a plethora of outreach efforts to prostitutes, the poor, and the sick. The Rader Tabernacle ran a soup kitchen during the depression. Currently, we see prevailing churches using a revival of old methods such as food pantries, and innovative new methods such as the recycling of cars, financial counselling, partnering with small churches, crisis pregnancy work and advocacy for the unborn – the list is very long. To use a metaphor from Martin Luther King Jr., these churches are not thermometers that registered the spiritual temperature of surrounding society, but rather they are thermostats that help regulate it.

How large should a large church be to be a thermostat, to significantly reach people for Christ and at the same time create a Christian presence in the city?

For some time, the figure of 2% of the population has been accepted as the figure where a group of people become change agents in their society. I believe a church should establish what it considers to be its parish or, if you will, its catchment area. Then, within that area should seek, as a baseline goal, to grow to where its weekend service attendance is 2% of the population. So if a city is 100,000 in population, but the church sees itself as ministering to the northern half, which is 50,000, then its baseline growth goal should be 1,000 in weekend services. A church in a town of 3,000 with a surrounding drive-in community of 12,000, totaling 15,000, should set a growth target of 300.

Thus, church growth needs to have baseline targets that are linked to influence percentages.

Why do we need cathedrals in Canada?

People are followers. Thus, people need to see a visible presence of Christianity. There is a perception that churches are empty and that Christianity is dying. The Globe and Mail will eagerly display any evidence that points in this direction. This perception accelerates the fraying of what I call the fabric of social righteousness. The speed at which Canada adopted same-sex marriage this year is an example. Further, this perception of the death of Christianity retards evangelism on every front. Talk of Christianity and even church is more and more considered to be a sign of marginalization, of being on the fringe, and who wants to live there?

On the other hand, when there is an understanding that Christianity is vibrant and growing, the opposite effect occurs. I believe we tasted a little of that during the height of the March for Jesus movement, and I believe we are seeing it with the wide-spread use of Alpha, especially after Alpha’s “invite the nation to dinner” campaign in the Fall of 2003.

Furthermore, I believe that Canadian people, because of the perception that Christianity is a fringe occurrence, are fearful of being harmed or taken advantage of. Because of this fear, they need places where there are many side-doors, where they can safely form relationships and have time for rumination.

Finally, Canadian people are changing. Our culture is morphing day by day. We need the creativity that can be generated by Canadian cathedral churches.

Note that here, for the first time, I have said “Canadian cathedral churches.” One of the issues is that of size. Objections are that it is the size which makes large churches uniquely American, and therefore true Canadian-content churches should not be large. This is in spite of the fact that the largest churches of the world lie outside of North America, that no American mega-church has yet to even approach the size of some of them and, as I have shown, the tabernacle movement was very widespread in Canada.

But there is a Canadian-content issue, and I would propose that it is located in the question of the need for new methodology to reach and influence the unique Canadian spiritual climate. It is precisely because Canada needs tailored, target specific methodology, that we need the creativity that large churches can generate. Let me expand on this if I may.

Canada is much further down the post-modern/secularization trail than the United States. This is evident in the polls that measure religious practice and spirituality in both countries. In those polls Canada will rank approximately 50% below the U.S. in every indicator.

Thus it is here in Canada that a post-modern apologetic needs to be developed that does not sacrifice either the gospel or righteousness, an apologetic that would serve evangelism, not leaving seekers in a fog. I believe that Alpha is serving us in this way now. Alpha, in my opinion, is more than an evangelistic program; it is in itself a post-modern apologetic project in the way that it combines rational teaching with demonstrations of signs and wonders and the reality of community and worship, plus the provision of a safe place for questions to be asked and everyone’s opinion to be respected. Perhaps it is worth noting that Alpha originated in a prevailing church in a country which shares many spiritual characteristics with Canada, namely, England. I would suggest that we can look to the Alpha program for guidance as to how other kind of applied apologetics could work in Canada.

We also need churches to pioneer communication methods that overcome Canadian suspicion of religion, especially of Christianity. The day of the televangelist is over. But the use of media in innovative ways is still a possibility that large churches could exploit and all the churches in the area, or in the country, could benefit.

We need churches that, like the old tabs – Beulah and Tenth Avenue, and others – will be Maple trees, scattering seeds across open fields, fields that ten to twenty years later are a Maple bush. In this way, large churches are seen as an integral part of the plan to saturate Canada with church plants, to grow them dynamically and to see them continue to multiply around the world.

Finally, as previously mentioned, we need churches to create ways of offering significant and life changing social services in Canada. A recent Ipsos-Reid poll showed that Canadians rank “overcoming child poverty” as the main thing churches should be doing. I don’t think that should be the main thing, but we must figure out a way to make huge social impact in Canada as part of our commitment to kingdom building.

Thus, it is not the size of the church which distinguishes it from American or world churches; it is the creative ways in which those churches pioneer ministry in their society that makes them unique. We will not create unique Canadian churches by keeping them small, while the whole world grows them big; we will create unique Canadian churches by receiving the creative ministries that they engender.

How do we get to the cathedral level?

Do the spiritual work. Certainly we have not left modernism so far behind that we think we can give up on strategic planning. But the mechanistic strategic planning model needs to be a part of, but not an equal partner to, the spiritual work. If a great church grows up out of something other than a spiritual labour and the favour of the Lord, it will ultimately end as a spiritual graveyard.

The kind of spiritual work needed is huge. Because of its size, I can only reference it here. There must be prayer. We must seek the Lord for workers, for wisdom, for opportunities, and for resources. We must wait for answers. I believe that the Lord will give us all of these things as we ask. There is also the establishment of unity. This is unity among the churches of the city and unity among the churches of the denomination. At any time and at any place where we think in a “them/us” paradigm, the Holy Spirit is grieved. Unity is a deep thing with God and it is imperative that we not treat it as a cliché. And there are issues of spiritual warfare, and related to them, issues of purifying our hearts and learning dependence and submission. At the same time, we must also work and persevere.

Make cathedral churches a strategic target. While we pray we must do work. It is never acceptable to simply pray and wait to see what happens. We must pray, act, see what happens, pray more, and adjust the action. This is the pattern throughout the Bible. See especially Nehemiah.

We need to be identifying workers who have the potential, not only to plant churches, but to build them to great sizes. I am not sure that we have refined our assessment tools to this level. Or perhaps it cannot be done, for many things impact the ultimate size to which a church will grow under a certain person’s ministry. Nonetheless, when strong profiles in evangelism and leadership emerge in church planters, we should be very strategic in our placement of those leaders.

We need to search for opportunities. I think we should look for opportunities through at least two lenses. First, consider demographic opportunities. It is easy to see where population is moving geographically. We should plan ahead. We should seek to plant churches early rather than late. There are also people-group opportunities. For example, tens of thousands of mandarin Chinese are now immigrating to Canada and our Chinese Association leaders are working hard to build ways of reaching them. Iranians are open to the gospel. The list goes on and on. And the potential for churches to grow among certain people groups is very real.

We need to search for resources. Land, or sites inside the older city limits, are a real need. Consider property first. And when we seek property, we should not strangle the growth of the church with small pieces of land or small buildings. Remember that Willow Creek grew to 3000 before they moved out of the theatre and on to property. So it is possible that we are, in a number of cases, building too soon. Urban sites are another matter. But here again, we should seek sites that will allow growth.

Money is of course a real need. Churches must have financial resources to influence their communities. But both church planters and denominational leaders must hear carefully the warning about seeking people for their money. Thus, prayer and strong stewardship foundations must be laid.

Search for wisdom. This is a step beyond strategic planning. It is the ability to hear the knock of opportunity, the tuning of the heart to the heart of Christ, to sense the direction of the soft breeze of the Holy Spirit. It is to bypass some situations that on the surface look golden, and perhaps turn to some others that require more risk. Wisdom is essential.

Finally, we need to make commitments, commitments to have cathedral churches, even in small parishes. To achieve the level of commitment we need to cast the vision, a vision not only of size, but of the methods and impact that can come from these churches. We need to incorporate large churches into our overall strategic plans. We need to stop thinking that there is some sort of dichotomy between church growth and the planting of churches. Few churches are in a church planting mode constantly, but all should be in a church growth by conversion mode constantly.

Our commitments need to be public. This creates anticipation, it gives permission, and it attracts resources. I believe that attempting great things attracts people with great resources and people with great gifting.

Conclusion

In this paper I am still sketching, as opposed to presenting draftsman quality plans. But perhaps you can take the sketch and begin to draw your own plans. Canada needs churches that will creatively and powerfully speak the message of Christ into their communities. Canada, I believe, needs cathedrals. I hope that you will be part of laying some of their foundation stones.

OTHER QUOTES

I was once talking with Dallas Willard about Islam. He dropped this little thought virus: "Remember, Brian, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued by the benefits it brings to its non-adherents." The virus has taken hold in my thinking, bringing to mind sayings of our Lord, like "the birds of the air" nesting in the branches of the kingdom of God, people seeing the light of our good deeds and "glorifying your Father in heaven," "by their fruits you will know them."

How different is this missional approach to the "rhetoric of exclusion" that worked so well in modernity: "There are blessings to being on the inside. You're on the outside and so can't enjoy them. Want to be a blessed insider like us?"

In contrast, missional Christianity says, "God is expressing his love to all outsiders through our acts of kindness and service. You're invited to leave your life of accumulation and competition and self-centeredness to join us in this mission of love, blessing, and peace. Want to join in the mission?"

¹Michael S. Hamilton, Christianity Today, November, Vol.13, 2000 44, No. 13, Page 62 Also see online exhibit of the Rader Tabernacle http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/gospelcom.net

² See paper by Ken Draper