History

Portico Church is a church plant from Christ the Rock Community Church in Menasha.  Lead Pastor Eric Leverance had been on staff with student ministries for about 10 years when God started to stir something in him and a few other individuals about starting a church. Over a couple of years the vision for Portico Church was formed.

When we first started, our focus was to reach out to the younger generation of college students and the artist community in Oshkosh.  We wanted to do things a little differently than most of the churches we had experienced or seen.  Our slogan was that we desired to be a simple church, small on structure but big on community.  We had our first official worship gathering at Basic Books Café in Oshkosh during the Fall of 2006.  In the early days, we shared a community meal each week, incorporated art into our worship gatherings, valued creative expressions of worship and built a close-knit community of people that were doing life together.  Our outreach efforts centered around the monthly gallery walk in downtown Oshkosh.

About 18 months later, we left Basic Café and began meeting at Grace Chapel – the building which is now our permanent home.  We met on Sunday nights with the same vision and same heart.  But as time went by we sensed God was calling us to shift our focus.  So on November 9, 2009 we basically re-launched our church on Sunday mornings with an emphasis on reaching those people that we do life with on a regular basis.  We didn’t fully understand what that meant, but we were willing to follow where the Lord was leading us.

Our community has mixture of all ages and types of people.  It’s a friendly, comfortable community of normal, everyday people.  People who are trying to follow the Lord Jesus, live a life that honors him, and shares His hope with those around us.