About Us

Mission Statement

We acknowledge Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, and seek to follow his ways. We are a multiethnic Mennonite Brethren church, inviting people of all ethnicities to follow Jesus. To do this, we focus on equipping and empowering our church family to make more disciples for Jesus Christ, as guided by the Holy Spirit. We seek to bridge the cultural gaps that can occur between generations and ethnicities, by striving to be a loving community where all can worship together.

History

Portage Avenue Church’s history dates even further back than the bold “1960” engraved in our brick building.

But we’re primarily concerned with our future, and where God is leading us.

When our once-large church started to dwindle and show its age, God showed us a new vision for what it would mean to be a church that reached the city of Winnipeg.

We saw that local churches made up of immigrant families were struggling to minister to their younger members, who would leave that church in order to worship somewhere else in English. God showed us that there’s a way to help these churches, by making a place for people of many backgrounds to worship Jesus in multiple languages, under one roof, as one church body.

Our historical background is Dutch-German-Russian Mennonite, and we’re a member of the Mennonite Brethren conference of churches. So we were an ethnic church. But have now been joined by other ethnic churches to form something new… a multi-ethnic church.

We have the space for multiple services, where congregations can fellowship, pray and worship in their own language. At the same time, our main service, Sunday mornings at 10am, is a centralized English worship service (with translations offered). This common service gives younger generations of immigrant families a place to worship in English, and it unites us together under the banner of Jesus!

We are seeing people join us in this vision from all walks of life. We invite you to join us in this vision! Plan your visit to us on a Sunday morning, or hit up a pastor for a chat during the week!

If you want to read more about our history and the recent changes we’ve made, check out this article from the MB Herald!