Do evangelical churches attract more young people in Quebec?

Thursday night, on Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal, in the heart of the shopping district, adults in their twenties are gathered in front of a commercial space. Through the bay window, we see a dense crowd. The atmosphere is festive and the loud music attracts the attention of passersby.

In front of the door, Raphael Boucher, 26, starts a conversation with the curious by answering their questions and inviting them to come in.

Five years ago, I gave my life to Jesus, he explains. I was depressed. I was in a low point in my life. I gave my life to Jesus, and then it filled the emptiness that I had inside me.

The commercial space was rented for one month by Revival Montreal. This is a movement affiliated with Good News Chapela Pentecostal evangelical church in Montreal. Between mid-July and mid-August, masses were held there at noon and in the evening.

People are quite open, more than you think, because we don’t approach it like a religion, we really approach it like a message of love.adds Raphael Boucher.

By setting up shop temporarily on Sainte-Catherine Street, the aim of Revival Montreal was to be visible and recruit new members.

It’s about bringing the Church to where the people are.explains the leader of the movement Revival Montreal Emmanuel Ouellet.

There are a lot of silos in the evangelical movement, in the Christian movement. Everyone is in their own church. [Le but est] to bring Christians together.

Inside the venue, musicians get the crowd, mostly made up of young adults, singing. For this last evening in this temporary venue, around ten people have decided to join in Good News Chapel and to be baptized.

Ronnen Ladores, 21, is one of them. It was the word of God that really struck us. It lifted us up and […] After that day, we decided to come back until the endhe testifies.

The young man was previously a member of the Adventist Church. It was while walking along Rue Sainte-Catherine that he discovered Revival Montreal and decided to join the movement.

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Churches 2.0

Churches like Good News Chapel are becoming fashionable on social media, and pastors’ sermons are becoming more like personal growth speeches.

You see pastors who are going to create live content, who have Instagram pages. These are totally intentional strategies to reach young people and reach people online.explains Benjamin Gagné, a doctoral student in religious sciences at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Montreal.

Some of these churches have even developed a banner with several places of worship. This is the case of La Chapelle, which brings together the faithful in three churches in Montreal and Gatineau, or Le Portail, which has five churches on the North Shore of Montreal and in Abitibi.

They really have an approach where the individual and the subjective are very present. Emotion and experience are very central to the way they organize themselves.

Such visible gatherings of young Christians may be surprising in a Quebec where Catholic churches are emptying and selling out. But despite this revamped image of Christianity, the proportion of young adults without religion who join the ranks of an evangelical church in Quebec remains low.

Studies conducted in the 2010s estimated that around 10% of new believers join the ranks of the most dynamic churches., says Jacob Legault-Leclair, a doctoral student in sociology of religions at the University of Waterloo.

What we see among young people is that they are less and less religious in general. Evangelicals are not immune to this movement. Today, nearly 50% of young Quebecers, millennials and younger, are without religion.adds Mr. Legault-Leclair.

Evangelical churches that cater to young adults still advocate fundamentalist values. Abstinence before marriage is the norm, and acceptance of homosexuals varies.

The place of homosexuality in these churches is a big question.explains Benjamin Gagné.

Can they come in? I think so, but do they have a place in the institutions or in the leadership? That’s a whole other area where I think the answer is no.

Most of the new members of these churches are people who grew up in an evangelical family environment. A third of the new members are from immigrant backgrounds and were already members of an evangelical church in their country of origin.

The evangelical movement, all denominations combined, is making little progress in Quebec. It represented 1% of the Quebec population in 1971. In 2021, it represented approximately 1.5% of the entire population.