Why Crossover Church?
AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
Five years ago I was reading John 5:24 when God stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t just the verse, but the phrase “crossed over” that caught my attention. At the time, we didn’t know what God had planned or how He was going to use this moment but soon, our lives were going to be change.
Very truly I tell you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.
At the time, we were involved at Celebrate Church in Sioux Falls, SD. Then one day, Pastor Loy, shared the vision to start 50 churches in 10 years. We did not know when or where but we knew we were going to be involved in starting new life-giving churches.
It was not until we had a conversation with our friend and my co-worker at Celebrate that the when and where became clear. Monte and Jody Gannon invited us to help start Meadows Church in the Omaha area. In May of 2017, we would leave everything that we knew in SD and head to Omaha, NE.
We went to help start Meadows Church with the intention to start a new church shortly afterwards. It became clear that this new church was to be called Crossover Church. This new church was going to be all about “helping people CROSSOVER to new life in Christ.” But the one thing that we did not know was the when and the where.
While helping launch Meadows, we began praying about the when and the where of Crossover Church. The more that we prayed and the more that we talked to people, the more that the northwest area of Omaha came up, especially the Bennington/Elkhorn area. Over time, this is the area that we believed that God was calling us to go to. Not just to start a church but to start a movement of disciples making disciples and churches planting churches.
And this is when we started to dream…
OUR DREAM
Our story has led us to start dreaming of what could be and how God could use us in this new Kingdom work. We knew that starting Crossover Church was bigger than just a church but that it was going to be many churches, a movement of churches that planted churches because the main focus was going to be making disciples that made disciples. If we would focus on starting a church, disciples might be made. But if we focused on making disciples, we will get a church.
So, we started to dream and pray and God began to give us a glimpse of what could be.
Our dream is to saturate the Douglas County area, our city, our state, and the world with the love of Jesus. We will initially start life-giving environments – Core Groups, Community Groups, and Weekend Celebrations, in the 46 zip codes in the Douglas County area. These groups will focus on sharing and showing the love that Jesus has shared and shown us. We will share the message of Jesus and use His methods to reach people that do not know Him and are not following Him.
Of the 500,000+ people that live in this area, 46% claim to be “none” which means they have no religious affiliation or preference. Which means they do not have a home. This means that there are people that are orphans who do not know that their heavenly Father loves them and that He has a home for them, not only in heaven but also on earth.
The only way that we will be able to saturate our community is to take Jesus’ message and methods into every community. And this needs to be completed by developing relationships with people that we do life with.
To see our dream happen we need to:
- Be a family that becomes a movement of faith, hope, and love that transforms the city of Omaha and the world. We will love our community, provide hope for the hopeless, and share our faith with the faithless.
- Be a family that is full of people that love God and people. A family that is welcoming to all people no matter where they have been or what they have done.
- Be a family that shares and shows the good news of Jesus, welcomes people into the family of God, and helps each other grow closer to Jesus
- Be a family that equips people, helps them pursue their calling, and sends them out on mission. We will focus on equipping, disciplining, and multiplying.
In doing these things we will start three new churches in five years and ten churches in ten years.