Pastor Narry Santos opened the wooden doors of Salvation Army West Hill Community Church with clammy hands.
It was the first Sunday of January 2012 and accompanied by some of his Greenhills Christian Fellowship (GCF) Toronto congregation members, he was surveying their new home in the city’s east end.
“I was extremely excited about the move but I also had a sense of fear in what will happen in the new church,” the pastor said.
His eyes swept across the brightly lit worship hall until, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the smiling face of Salvation Army’s Pastor Derrick Barrow, motioning for the congregants to come closer.
Instantly, Santos’ fears were quashed and he knew he made the right decision in renting space from the Scarborough church to house his 150-member congregation. GCF, mostly made up of Filipino-Canadians, is just one of many immigrant churches in the GTA that are finding unique solutions to accommodate their growing congregations and offset skyrocketing rents.
According to the 2011 National Household Survey, about 7.2 per cent of Canadians are affiliated with immigrant churches, an almost 5 per cent rise from figures in the 2001 census.
“Leasing space is becoming more common among small churches — mostly made up of immigrants — especially when the rate of renting facilities becomes steeper each year,” said pastor Howard Olver from Kingsview Free Methodist Church in Etobicoke.
According to Olver, fluctuating rent fees make it typical for immigrant churches to move at least four or five times before finding a place where they can permanently settle.
Santos and his congregation are paying $2,000 per month to use Salvation Army’s church in 305 Morrish Rd. throughout the week. This includes use of the facility’s upstairs worship hall, the basement fellowship hall and two other spare rooms. The fee is significantly cheaper than the $6,000 they used to pay Centennial College’s Progress Campus for the use of four rooms including a conference room every Sunday.
However, this price tag is minuscule compared to the astronomical 650 per cent rent increase Eglise Chrétienne Emmanuel, like other small faith groups renting space from the TDSB, received last September. Having paid $3,500 per year since 2008, the Haitian community church was blindsided by a school board memo asking them to pay $1,900 per month to renew their yearly contract.
The increase, which led Eglise Chrétienne Emmanuel to abandon their Sunday worship at Dorset Park Elementary School, was made after faith-based groups were struck out from the Ministry of Education’s Community Use of Schools subsidy program and slapped with a 43.7 per cent for all permits that was set to begin last January.
Immigrant churches also face another quandary as city council recently passed a bylaw preventing new congregations from meeting in eight per cent of the city’s heavy industrial zone, where people used to flock for more affordable places of worship. Groups are, however, able to establish new places of worship in 92 per cent of city land.
Despite this stipulation, Olver still calls the move a “double whammy.”
“Immigrant churches are growing but instead of getting help from the school board and the city, they are faced with more and more problems when it comes to finding places to settle,” he said.
With decreasing help from some schools and the city, mainline churches have extended a helping hand to some immigrant churches, inviting them to lease space, said director Robert Cousins of Christian higher education institution Tyndale University.
St. Luke’s Church at Bayview and Finch Aves., for example, is trying to integrate Iranian, Korean and Persian immigrants into their congregation by giving them free space to worship.
Young Nak Presbyterian Church, on the other hand, a Korean-Canadian congregation that has over a thousand members in attendance every Sunday, has also opened its doors to other religious ethnic groups.
At McNicoll Ave. and Victoria Park Dr. in Scarborough, the church now has congregations from Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos worshipping with them every Sunday.
Cousins said that the ordeal immigrant churches have to undergo in finding a permanent place of worship is less than ideal but these new solutions present a new hope.
“The good thing about these arrangements is that it gives immigrant churches cheaper places to gather and gives mainline churches revenue to stay open and afloat,” he said. “It’s a win-win situation.”
Originally published in the Toronto Star
