 the past six months, the Supreme Court rejected the country’s only Christian law school, and the government required organizations looking for summer-job funding to sign off on an attestation affirming LGBTQ and abortion rights. “But the gospel is advancing,” Symons said. “Lives are being transformed, people are being baptized, and churches are being planted.... God is alive and well in Canada.” Saved by the Light Symons grew up in an Anglican home but wasn’t saved until he was 22. Freshly graduated from university and already weary of the meaninglessness of life, Symons hit “random” on his CD player and heard DC Talk’s “In the Light.” I keep trying to find a life on my own apart from You. I’m the king of excuses, I’ve got one for every selfish thing I do. What’s going on inside of me? I despise my own behavior. This only serves to confirm my suspicions that I’m still a man in need of a Savior! “I was instantly captured by Jesus,” Symons said. “I felt so chosen, so enlightened. I knew life would never be the same again.” Robbie Symons / Courtesy of Harvest Oakville Symons resisted the ministry at first—he’d watched his grandfather pastor a small-town Anglican church, and “ministry seemed so small to me.” However, “God’s claim became stronger and stronger, and I gave in to the notion of seminary and then pastoral ministry bit by bit.” After seminary, he landed a job as an associate pastor but longed to see God do more. “I was in churches where leadership was based on good stuff like compassion,” he said, “but it wasn’t theologically substantive.” Then, in the early 2000s, Symons was exposed to a simple and biblical vision for the local church at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago. “That’s when I got introduced to Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology,” he said. Symons read John Piper and Al Mohler and Don Carson, then George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. “I fell in love with the truth in a new way,” he said. From there, it was an easy jump to dream about planting a gospel-centered church with Reformed theology in Toronto. Planting in Ontario In the summer of 2003, Symons held a Bible study. Eighteen people came. It wasn’t an auspicious time to start a conservative church. Days before, Canada’s first same-sex couple was legally wed. They would be chosen as Time magazine’s Canadian newsmakers for 2003. “The two men have come to symbolize something much bigger: the unprecedented acceleration of social liberalism in Canada in 2003,” Canadian bureau chief Steven Frank wrote. “From gay marriage to moves to decriminalize marijuana and provide supervised injection booths for drug addicts in Vancouver, 2003 will go down in history as the year that Canada rethought what was taboo.” Canada’s largest Protestant denomination—the mainline United Church of Canada—was keeping pace with society, voting to endorse same-sex marriage in August. Around the same time, Canadian religious attendance began to drop more rapidly across the board. So it was surprising, then, when Symons’s little group increased to 24, then 30, then 45. They outgrew an office building, then a church basement. “People were coming in with such an appetite for the preaching of the Word,” Symons said. “It seems so basic, but God was moving.... There was an apparent hunger in the people he drew to us.” The expansion and excitement caught the attention of a nearby Baptist church. Which is why, just five months in, Harvest Oakville’s 70 attendees moved into a $7 million building. Room to Grow The Baptist congregation was “severely struggling, and on the verge of closing their doors,” Symons said. There were only about 100 people left in the building that sat 400. “They gave us their building, but more importantly, they gave us their people,” he said. In a single day, the church population more than doubled as “they became us.” Harvest Oakville held its first official service in the new building on Easter 2004. By fall, they needed two services. A few years later, even with four services, there were too many cars for the parking lot. Harvest Oakville moved into a new building in 2012. / Courtesy of Harvest Oakville At first, the growth came largely from dissatisfied believers in other churches. (“We aren’t trying to steal sheep, but we’re not going to apologize for growing green grass,” Symons said.) But over time, those joining were new converts. “We hear amazing stories,” Symons said. “So many people are lost and miserable and hopeless. Time and again we hear people say, ‘I went through life and I bottomed out before meeting Christ’—the classic gospel conversion story.” In 2012, Harvest Oakville moved into a larger building. Within a month, they’d grown from 2,000 to 3,000 regular attenders. A few years later, the number rose past 4,000. But Symons’s ambitions were never to build a megachurch. “I’ve been up close to all that stuff, and it’s overrated,” he said. “I’m not against it. I think God is using it to do great stuff. But that’s not what we set out to be.” So they started to plant. Plants Pose Challenges In 2009, Harvest Oakville planted its first church, 30 minutes closer to Toronto. The core group was 50 adults. Today, about 1,000 attend. “Where we are, so many people are brand-new to the country,” Duncan said. “That’s really exciting but also poses a lot of challenges.” One is the lack of default culture. “We’re having to learn and grow in our ability to understand the paradigms and perspectives people bring with them from their culture of origin,” Duncan said. “How do Caribbean people think about motherhood? How does a person from East Asia deal with honor and shame? How do those raised in Africa approach work, family, and leisure? These are all things Westerners don’t even think about. I’m continually having to apologize and correct myself because I so often wrongfully assume that everyone thinks the way I do.” Ted Duncan planted Harvest Bible Chapel Brampton. / Courtesy of Ted Duncan But the religious foundation that most immigrants share—generally, they aren’t as secular or atheistic as those born in Canada—is helpful, he said. “Everybody is religious in some way, shape, or form,” he said. “Where we live there are all kinds of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus. So when I take an Uber to work and I’m talking to a Hindu or Sikh driver, there is already a context of faith and religion and common ground in that they believe something about something.... I’m able to build on that.” Jason Matta pastors Harvest Oakville’s third church plant, which is even closer to Toronto’s city center. Added to the ethnic diversity—half of Toronto is a visible minority—he sees socioeconomic differences that transcend ethnicity or race. “We have found it to be messy for sure,” he said. “The more we’ve reached into the community, the more we’re dealing with complex issues. It’s not clean-cut, like, ‘Oh, God, you have us in a diverse church and now we’re all happy.’... It’s more like, ‘Okay, now I don’t know what to do.’ Now we have to figure out how to do life together and how to meet certain needs.” Our evangelism strategy is you. You’re sitting next to people at work and school. Share the gospel with them. Matta’s team leans a lot on Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy. And his evangelism strategy, like Oakville’s, is the people themselves. “Our people are very missional,” Matta said. “Every week people are introducing me to people they bring from work or school or family members. The body is inviting them in.” That didn’t just happen. Like Symons, Matta tells his congregation, “Our evangelism strategy is you. You’re sitting next to people at work and school. Share the gospel with them.” Milk and Meat High numbers of recent immigrants compounds one of the biggest challenges that pastors face: the unevenness of spiritual maturity in the congregation “We don’t feel the need to tailor the service to the unbeliever,” Matta said. After all, he’s also teaching to seminary professors. “But we do work very hard to communicate God’s Word in a way that is simple and clear.” Duncan likens it to preparing “meat rather than milk” for every service, but “cutting it into small pieces.” “What has captivated people is we sing contemporary worship songs and speak in everyday language, but we don’t try to simplify things—we teach the whole counsel of God,” he said. For example, they nixed formal language such as “partake” but kept “theologically rich” terms such as “substitutionary atonement” and “reconciliation.” Duncan has watched Symons put words such as “justification” on the screen and then break it down for the audience. “He doesn’t water down the theology or get rid of it,” said Duncan, who follows Symons’s example. “That’s the thing that changes people’s lives. If you teach people, they’ll be