The story of our church spans more than a century and is the product of a merger in 2024.
Our current building opened in 1923. The congregation that commissioned the building formed in 1920 as Davisville Baptist Church. When the building at 527 Mt. Pleasant Rd. opened, they changed their name to Mount Pleasant Road Baptist Church. Over the next century, the church remained faithful to the gospel and was at times influential in the Baptist history of Ontario. It was a flagship church when the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches formed in 1953. A book on the history of the church was written on its 90th anniversary. You can read it for free here. The congregation experienced some decline in the late 2010s and began to seek options to strengthen its witness.
In the fall of 2008, Grace Fellowship Church Toronto sent out John Bell to be the founding pastor of a downtown church plant. In January 2009, the group was graciously gifted a space to meet on Sundays on the tenth floor of the office tower at Atrium-on-Bay (Bay & Dundas) by Christian business owners. The founding members formally covenanted together as New City Baptist Church on July 3, 2010 during a special baptism service. The church would steadily grow over the next 13-years, even while meeting in four different locations in downtown Toronto. While it began as an independent congregation, it joined the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches denomination in 2015.
Word of the Mount Pleasant Road Baptist situation reached the elders of New City Baptist in late 2022. Over the next year and a half, the two congregations considered what it would look like to merge toward the ultimate end of preserving a fixed gospel outpost in an expensive global city for generations to come. On January 21, 2024, the two congregations merged to form Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.
To God be the glory, great things he hath done!