Sixteen hundred congregations, each deciding alone.

Every one of the United Church's 1,619 registrations is its own charity, and that is the most important fact about the church's structure. In its own words each is a community of faith: a congregation, or a pastoral charge of two or three points sharing ministry personnel. The church counted 2,442 congregations at the end of 2024, down from 7,633 in 1930, so a good many share a registration. Each has its own governing body, its own trustees, and its own decision when the time comes. Together they report just under half a billion dollars a year. Apart, most are small: the median runs on $124,000, more than half on under $150,000, and 265 on under $25,000.

Nobody sits on more than three of these boards. There is no officer class, no one whose seat gives a view across a province. Twelve per cent of governing bodies have three members or fewer, which for a congregation usually means the treasurer, the chair, and the one person who still comes to meetings. Sixteen regional councils and the General Council stand above them, but the registration, and the closure, belong to the community of faith.

Ontario has two in five; the Prairies a quarter; the Atlantic provinces an eighth. This is the church of the small town, the one with the white spire on the road in, and the record reads that way.

By annual revenue

By region

Region follows the riding a registration's mailing address falls in; 140 could not be assigned. Median revenue is $124,000 and the whole body reports $497 million; the median board has 7 members.

The model flags sixty-nine registrations, four per cent, well under Canada's nine. A flag means only that an organization's filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost their registration, and communities of faith have something that keeps filings steady: a hundred years of habit. Fifty-one of the sixty-nine run on under $150,000, and fewer than five have the stronger flag.

The church has said the harder thing itself. Its Toward 2035 work, published in December 2025, puts membership at 321,000 and average attendance at 111,000, finds that between 45 and 60 per cent of pastoral charges now meet its vulnerability criteria, and warns of a tipping point of closures within ten years. The General Council's own count is 64 congregations closed or amalgamated in 2022, 66 in 2023, and 31 in 2024.

The register tells the same story from the other end. Since 2011, 329 United Church registrations have been revoked, and the line is rising: eleven in 2021, then sixteen, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-seven, and thirty-one so far this year. Since 2019, 79 of those revocations were chosen, a governing body that voted, filed, and closed in order; 86 were for failing to file, closures that nobody decided. Half of the church's revocations happened without a decision. We do not name any of them. Each was a governing body of volunteers who kept a community of faith going past the point anyone could have asked, and the ones that lapsed did not stop because they gave up; they stopped because there was no one left to stop.

A lapse is not a cost-free closure. The building, the trust fund and the cemetery go where the law and the regional council's policy send them, the CRA taxes whatever was not passed to another charity in time, and its questions come to the last two names on the return. The volunteers deserve the credit; the cost falls on whoever comes after.

Revocations on the record, by year

Revocations published in the Canada Gazette, matched by name, 2011 to 5 September 2026. 329 in all.

A community of faith ends twice. Once under the Manual: the governing body calls a congregational meeting, notice is read at worship on two Sundays, the congregation votes to disband, and the regional council receives the request and decides what becomes of the property, which is held in trust as part of The United Church of Canada and whose proceeds the region divides by its own policy. And once under the Income Tax Act, with the final return, the transfer of what the charity held, and the notice in the Gazette. The first is grief and covenant, and the church knows how to do it; several regional councils have written guides to closing well. The second is paperwork, and the volunteer treasurer learns it alone, once, at the worst possible time.

The successor is almost always there: the community of faith in the next town, the regional council, a community foundation that will hold the memorial fund. What is missing is someone who has done this before, working with the governing body in the year before the building is sold rather than the month after.

Each organization in this case study is incorporated in a province or territory, or federally, and it closes under that statute first and under the Income Tax Act second. The two have an order, and no government page sets it out.

The Critical Path is that order on one folded sheet, one edition per jurisdiction: each step from the first hard conversation to the last filing, who decides it, and the document it files, with its regulator, its fee, and a specimen of its first page. Each edition will come as part of Foundations, with the Guide and access to the Foundations Course. Foundations is in development.

AnglicanSalvation ArmyLegionAgricultural societiesCommunity foundationsAll the case studies

The counts are arithmetic on three public files: the Canada Revenue Agency's list of charities and their annual returns, 2011 to 2024; the Canada Gazette's notices of revocation; and Elections Canada's postal code file, which places a mailing address in a riding. A "flag" is the mark our model, Canary v3 / Distress v3, puts on a charity whose filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost registration. It is a weak signal and we say so: about 1.4 in a hundred charities lose their registration within three years, about 2.9 in a hundred flagged ones do, and the rest carry on. We use flags to count, never to approach anyone.

This body's registrations are picked out by name. A few without the words in their legal name are missed, and unrelated bodies that share them are excluded by hand, so the count is close but not exact. Regions follow the riding of the mailing address, and 22 of Canada's 343 ridings are not yet in the crosswalk. Where a count is under five, we print "fewer than five", so that no organization can be picked out of it. The method brief has the model's validation, the counting rules, and the limits in full.

Local record, as reported: The United Church of Canada, Toward 2035 resource, December 2025; Broadview on the church's future and closure counts, May 2025; Shining Waters Regional Council, guidelines to help churches close well; East Central Ontario Regional Council, governance handbook, May 2026.

Sources: CRA List of Charities and T3010 returns, 2011 to 2024; Canada Gazette, Part I, revocations 2019 to 2026; Elections Canada, 2023 representation order. Model: Canary v3 / Distress v3, 1 July 2026; out-of-time AUC 0.68; flag precision 2.5 to 3.3 per cent. Counting script: case-study.py; the riding-level counts it produces: case-studies-aggregate.csv. The organization-level score file is available to a reviewer under a data agreement, and the method paper on request. If you find an error in the counting, write to info@publicbenefit.ca; we will correct the case study and record it in the correction log.