Find a church in Grimsby

A town at the Forty

Grimsby lies on the south shore of Lake Ontario at the foot of the Niagara Escarpment, where the Forty Mile Creek comes down from the mountain to the lake. Loyalist settlers arrived at the creek in the 1780s, and on 5 April 1790 the settlement held the first municipal meeting in Upper Canada. The place known as the Forty took the name of its township, Grimsby, in 1816; it was incorporated as a village in 1876 and as a town in 1922. The 2021 census counted 28,883 residents, from the lakeshore and the old downtown on Main Street to Grassie, a hamlet on the mountain inside the town’s boundary.

The camp ground at Grimsby Beach

In 1846 Methodists held a ten-day temperance rally on lakeshore land owned by J. B. Bowslaugh, and from 1859 they returned every summer for sermons under canvas. In 1875 Bowslaugh deeded twelve and a half acres to the new Ontario Methodist Camp Ground Company, and wood-frame cottages began to replace the tents. The resort drew more than 50,000 visitors in 1884, and its great Temple was built in 1888. The company went bankrupt in 1909 and the grounds became an amusement park, but the street pattern of the tent lots survives at Grimsby Beach, and so do many of the cottages, with the fretwork and bright paint that have the town calling them gingerbread cottages or painted ladies.

Across the town

St. Andrew’s Anglican Church goes back to the Loyalist settlers of the Forty. A log church went up in 1794, and the stone church on Main Street West was begun in 1819 and finished in 1825; the Town describes it as one of the first four Anglican churches built in Ontario. Further east along Main Street West, Trinity United Church stands where Grimsby’s Presbyterians built their first church in 1837, and since 2024 it has shared its building with St. John’s Presbyterian Church, which sold its own sandstone church on Mountain Street that year. That church is now the home of Living Light Canadian Reformed Church, which is worshipping in Beamsville while the building is renovated.

Other congregations are spread across the town: St. Joseph’s, the Catholic parish, on Livingston Avenue; St. George’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Ontario Street; Christ Our Saviour Lutheran on Main Street West; Mountainview Christian Reformed Church on Main Street East; Forestview Community Church on Lake Street; Centennial Park Baptist on Kennedy Road; Lakemount Worship Centre beside the Queen Elizabeth Way; NewLife Grimsby Church, which meets in the Livingston Activity Centre; Grimsby Bible Church on Park Road North, in the former St. Philip-by-the-Lake Anglican church; White Stone Reformed Church on Ridge Road West; Church on Hunter on Hunter Road; and a Church of Christ on Mountain Road. Up on the mountain at Grassie are Covenant Canadian Reformed Church, on Woolverton Road since 2006, and Grace Community Church on Mud Street West.

Visiting on a Sunday

St. Andrew’s holds the earliest service, at 8:00, and most of the others begin between 9:00 and 10:30. A second round comes late in the morning: Christ Our Saviour Lutheran at 11:15, Lakemount at 11:30 and St. Joseph’s at noon, after its Saturday vigil Mass at 5:00. Four congregations also meet in the afternoon: Covenant and Grace Community Church at 2:30, and Grimsby Bible Church and Living Light, in Beamsville for now, at 4:00. St. George’s celebrates the Divine Liturgy on two or three Sundays a month rather than every week, and Trinity United holds no services in July, so check the church’s own page before you go.