Montreal, Quebec

7.5 million people live in the province of Quebec, with 3.5 million living in the city of Montreal. Montreal was founded by the French in 1642. It is the second largest French-speaking city in the world, after Paris. Montreal was ranked first on the U.N. Human Development Index for Quality of Life.

Montreal is a crossroad between Europe and America, encompassing more than 100 ethnic groups.  Quebec is a distinct society in North America set apart by their language, their passion, their creativity, their strong cultural and historical identity.  This unique people are distinct from a religious and a spiritual perspective as well.

Quebecois are 85% Catholic in culture, yet less than 20% attend church. The society in Quebec is post-catholic and yet anything that is not Catholic in Quebec is seen as a cult.  In Quebec there are over 1000 spiritual organizations and cults.  20% of all books sold in Quebec are new age books. In radically rejecting The Catholic Church, the spiritual search of the Quebecois became very eclectic and non-Religious, resulting in a post-modernism more advanced in Quebec than in any other society in North America.

Quebec ranks number one in Canada in suicide, child poverty, divorce, unmarried couples, and illegitimate births. Suicide is the single highest cause of death  among males ages 15 to 24. 

The Quebecois is the largest unreached people group in North America.  In Montreal, the number of people who say they don’t believe in anything is up 51% since 1991. Less than 1% of the French speaking population are Evangelicals.  The evangelical population in 1905 was 30,000.  By the year 2000, that number rose only slightly - to a mere 37,500.  Today there is one Evangelical church for every 11,000 people. There are less Evangelical Christians in Quebec than in Cuba.   To have a church for every 1500 people, over 4000 new churches would need to be planted.