Q: Why home churches?
To answer this, we need to first explain where our “core group” of planters came from. Crossroads started with three families. Each of us were heavily involved in ministry at our parent churches — as worship leaders, elders, kitchen coordinators, Sunday School teachers, youth leaders, etc. As the calling to plant a new church began to set in, we felt that there were a few key things we wanted to address from the start. We felt that home churches offer the solutions we were looking for to address thing like “burnout” in ministry, among other things.
We are able to operate with very little administrative “overhead” — meaning that our time is spent in ministry, not planning for ministry. Our money is spent on ministry, not on buildings and salaries and utilities that traditionally represent the largest portion of a church’s budget. But most of all, our relationships are cultivated through ministry. Wherever and whenever we meet, it is about the people of the Church. We don’t “do” church at Crossroads, we are the Church.
Q: How’d you get the idea for Crossroads?
Our inspiration comes from many places. Our structure comes mostly from a strategy developed in international missions. There, the goal is to plant as many congregations in a city as possible so that the Body of Christ occupies the widest cross-section of society that it can. We’re doing something similar in Las Cruces. Our home churches are all unique, with different styles, different demographics represented, and different needs. As we grow, we expect our diversity to grow as well.
Our mandate is to plant new churches in our community as often as we can, developing the leadership for those congregations as we go along. We are part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which means (among other things) that we are a self-ordaining body. When a man is called by God to be a pastor, we have the authority and responsibility as a church to see that calling through. It’s a big responsibility, but so far God is blessing us with some terrific leaders in our churches and our community.
Q: How do I know if I want to help plant a new church with Crossroads?
Read through this list of church planting “nuggets” and see if any tug at your heartstrings:
1. People will want to hang out with you because you make them feel good. Do enough of this, and you’ll have the beginnings of a church.
2. The things that stir our hearts are the same things that stir the hearts of the lost. Our longing, our hopes, our fears, our comforts, our insecurities – they are common to all mankind. Only God through Jesus Christ can satisfy our hearts. While the lost may quench their thirsty hearts only to become thirsty again, only Christ can satisfy so that we never thirst again. This is the key message for Crossroads — and in fact for any new church in Las Cruces.
3. The usual progression of leadership in churches today is to seek to be more involved – more training, more classes to attend, more ministry functions to plan, more meetings to go to. But before long, leaders in the church find themselves spending most of their time in meetings (or preparing for meetings) and less and less time meeting new people and making lasting relationships. Crossroads strives to not be so busy running the church and planning for the church’s activities that we lose sight of the true purpose for the church.
4. We need to treat Las Cruces as a mission field in the same way that the American Churches have approached much of the rest of the world for the past several centuries.
5. We need to look at our cultural expressions and find how God is already at work in them, preparing the hearts of men and women to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need to learn how to proclaim, “That which you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you.” This is the missionary vision at its best.
Some key questions to ask are:
–What is the worldview of my friends?
–What is my friend’s decision-making pattern?
–What does it cost my friend to become a Christian?
–What kind of redemptive analogy does my friend understand?
–How does my friend view Christianity?
–What does my friend already understand about the gospel?
–Is my friend motivated by shame or by guilt?
–How will my friend understand Christian rituals?
–What is the best delivery system for exposing my friend to the gospel AND to the benefits of church life?
6. Crossroads doesn’t exist for the sake of the “churched.” It is being formed so that those who never would step foot in a “traditional” church in Las Cruces can find a connection to Jesus Christ in the homes of our members, in the workplace, at school, etc.
7. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” The words of Jesus, but not quoted from one of the Gospels. Paul quotes it in Acts 20:35 in his farewell speech to Ephesus. What other ways is Christ speaking today, and how might this look in a new church?
