Our Story

From the beginning, Missio has been a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and shares the mission of making disciples and planting churches, in our city and beyond, with C&MA churches in the Portland Metro Network.

Missio began in 2010 with a handful of men and women praying that God would raise up a diverse faith community to express the love of Jesus in word and deed in SW Portland and beyond. The original members met in Missional Communities (or MC’s) in homes throughout the westside of Portland to worship Jesus, love and care for one another, and love and serve the community around them. As our MC’s grew we started gathering them together once per month for a time of celebration and expressing God’s goodness through worship and sharing a larger “family meal”. We are forever grateful to St. Barnabas Church for allowing us to gather and grow in their fellowship hall in these beginning years!

In January 2012, we started meeting for our Sunday Expressions at Mary Rieke Elementary School in Hillsdale, while still focusing on discipleship and mission through our MCs. During this season, we began to see Missional Communities grow and multiply throughout Portland, and in 2018 we moved our Sunday Expression to Hayhurst School. While God has grown our missional footprint in our city and beyond, he has kept us in the southwest corner of Portland to love and serve the community that resides here.

In 2018, we began to pray about and explore the opportunity of having a more permanent space, or “home base”, for our Missio Family to worship, connect, encourage one another, and be equipped to be sent out to live life on mission with Jesus. We launched our Coming Home Vision Campaign in 2020, with 40 days of seeking God’s guidance through prayer & fasting, and then a season of financial giving. Just as we launched our season of giving, the global pandemic hit! We didn’t know it at the time, but God would use the challenges of the pandemic to bring us into relationship with another church community and building that would eventually become our home.

In May of 2020, our Lead Pastor started renting office space from Good Shepherd Lutheran Church (so he didn’t have to keep working in his basement at home). Later that year, we began hosting various Missio gatherings in the GSLC space. Through many months of building relationship with the GSLC Pastor and community, we discovered that God had introduced our two communities for a reason: we were looking for a “home base”, and GSLC was looking for someone they could sell their building to who would continue the legacy of gospel work they has started in 1950. In the fall of 2021, GSLC agreed to sell their property to us for half of the appraised market market value, and Missio closed on our “new home” in December 2021.

Click the link below to take an aerial tour of our church home.