Crossway Times
Crossway in the Beginning
In the Path of the Storm
Colorado Women's Retreat
Pastor Profile: Willie O'Burke
Inside Look: Greeley
Joining Crossway
Nueva Vida (New Life)
Web Extra
Operation East Coast
Update from Vsetin
Printable Newsletters
July 2008 Issue
Pastor Tom Harcus,
Crossway Chapel of Wilmington, North Carolina
It was still early in the summer of 1992, as my
wife Dawn and I crested a hill just north of Fort
Collins, Colorado, and had our first view of the
community in which God had called us to
establish Mountain View Community, the first
Crossway Chapel. It was a holy moment as we
looked out over a city of 100,000 strangers that
were beginning to awaken from the darkness of
night. We were filled with excitement, gratitude,
and a sense of destiny, as well as feelings of
inadequacy for the formidable task before us --
maybe a touch of what the apostle Paul felt as he looked toward Athens or Corinth, prayerfully asking God to glorify Himself by saving many.
Our twenty hour drive back from suburban Chicago proved to be what the Great Physician ordered. Dawn and I processed our loss of friends, who had become very dear to us, while going to a new community in the West where we knew no one. We prayed, sang, cried and laughed in the company of our son Josh (then 3 years old) and golden retriever who had driven with us in the moving truck’s cab going from lap to lap for over 1000 miles.
We were riding in with a clear sense of God’s leading and longed to see a church arise from the foothills of central Colorado that would have a unique contribution and participation in God’s kingdom on earth. This new church was to reflect our own journeys and longings, to be a church that had at its core a winsome genuineness. People who would learn to do life together. It was to be a gathering of God’s people who had a keen sense of His greatness and grace and who would be passionate about seeing people reconciled to our unrivaled Savior.
This new type of church was to be grounded in a strong, firm, unwavering, biblical foundation that leaned toward expositional preaching and culturally relevant worship that lifted up the greatness of God and the hearts of His people. This new church was to be passionate about engaging the culture with the reality of the risen Jesus, while being equally committed to equipping every believer toward Christ-like maturity. This new church was to grow within the context of genuine community and yet never lose sight of the lost and dying world that God had commissioned it to engage with the love of God.
Little did Dawn and I know
that morning, these
aspirations would be the seedlings of a growing
cluster or movement of churches...the Crossway
Chapel movement. From Mountain View
Community Church’s humble beginnings in
Webber Junior High School in the spring of 1993,
God has birthed a work of His Spirit that has
really just begun. Most recently, Crossway
Chapel movement celebrated its first of many (by
God’s grace) third generation churches -
Crossway Chapel of Greeley (a granddaughter
church plant).
Crossway Chapel is a movement of churches that
embraces God’s design for multiplication. From
the most basic level of ministry to networks of
churches in a given locale, multiplication is to be
prayed for, anticipated, embraced, demonstrated
and celebrated. Consider the potential of
multiplication versus simple addition.
Starting in 2000 with only one Crossway Chapel,
church, Mountain View Community, multiplied
in 2001 with the birth of Windsor Community
Church. If each church then multiplies every five
years (providing ample time to get established
and develop ministries
for multiplying leaders)
and does not get any
larger than 200 (by God’s
grace a very realistic
milestone), then there
would be over 100,000
people being shepherded,
and equipped in ministry
within the Crossway
Chapel movement by the
time I hit life expectancy
in 2040.
Each of us is part of a larger whole. The Crossway Chapel movement has just begun! We invite each of you to be prayerful for the leaders involved in each church. Roll up your sleeves, grab an oar and let us start to move together as an armada of churches. May God bring Himself much glory through our simple loving devotion as desperate and joyful laborers in His harvest!
Information about joining the Crossway Chapel movement can be found here
