A dwindling congregation that owns a red brick church building in South Osborne, Winnipeg has found a creative way to keep its doors open while meeting a vital need in the neighbourhood.
If all goes according to plan, the sanctuary of Churchill Park United Church will be echoing with the cries and laughter of children by next fall.
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The $4.4-million construction project will transform the main floor of the church, at the corner of Beresford Avenue and Nassau Street, into a 112-space daycare centre, while the second floor will become a community hub with meeting space for congregants and other community groups.
A few years ago, the aging congregation — which averaged 30 or 40 people on a Sunday — came to the painful conclusion that they wouldn’t be able to keep managing their building much longer.
“After a January snowstorm we were sending a 75-year-old guy up onto the roof to scrape the solar panels,” said longtime congregant John McNairnay. “Not a good idea.”
Selling the space was an option, but the church decided it wasn’t ready to part with the beautiful 78-year-old building where many had been worshipping all their lives.
In January 2024, the church invited neighbourhood activists, businesspeople and community leaders to a dinner and asked them what they should do.
“They all had ideas,” McNairnay said, noting one urgent need identified was daycare space.
A 2024 study by the South Osborne Childcare Coalition identified the neighbourhood as a “child-care desert.” The few child-care centres that did exist had wait lists between two and five years long.
Karlee and Travis MacDonald tried to get a jump on child care, sending emails, making calls and filling out forms ever since they found out they were pregnant in 2024.
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Their son, Callahan, is 18 months old now and they’re still waiting. Travis quit his job to parent full-time and the couple is squeaking by on a single income. They’re on 14 wait lists.
Looking for child care is one of the most “stressful, uncertain, and exhausting parts of raising young children,” said Karlee, a member of the coalition.
After the meeting, the church created a committee that consisted of community members and congregants. It put out a call for proposals and received one from a daycare centre a few blocks away. Plans were drawn up for a child-care space that Riverview Ashland Child Care Centre will operate as a satellite facility.
In the next few months, the stained glass windows will be carefully removed, sandwiched between plywood for storage, and replaced with large clear windows that let in the daylight.
The project is being managed by a newly created non-profit called South Osborne Commons. The non-profit received $212,700 in grants from the province, the Winnipeg Foundation, and the City of Winnipeg to fund pre-construction studies and expenses.
South Osborne Commons is applying to a provincial fund that helps finance 60 per cent of construction costs. The other 40 per cent will need to be borrowed and raised.
It is looking for 100 private donors to each contribute $1,000 toward the first $100,000 of the project. Two members of the congregation have already made donations.
Churchill Park United held its last service in the sanctuary last week. It was bittersweet, said minister Dawn Rolke.
For the next 18 months, during construction, the congregation will gather at Augustine United Church in Osborne Village. That church recently went through a similar process of transforming its building into a daycare, drop-in centre, and emergency shelter while still preserving the sanctuary.
Hundreds of churches across Canada are in a similar situation, said Ken Thomas, who chairs the regional Property Commission for the United Church of Canada. Thomas is currently working with a handful of churches whose buildings are becoming too much for them to manage. The Churchill project is a model for what others could do, he said.
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Josiah Neufeld is a writer in Winnipeg and the author of “The Temple at the End of the Universe.”
This story was produced in conjunction with the Winnipeg Free Press, as part of a joint Religion in the News partnership covering issues of faith in Manitoba and nationally.
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