Crossroads Celebrates Sweet 16

            Crossroads Community Church is hosting a “Sweet 16 Celebration” on Feb. 21, to celebrate 16 years of ministry in Stokesdale. The service will include special music, and stories of the church’s work in Stokesdale and around the world. Guest speakers will encourage the congregation as they look to the future. Dinner will be served to all in attendance.

            On a Sunday morning in February 2000, Crossroads Community Church held its first public worship service in the old Stokesdale Elementary School cafeteria. Today the church has found its mission in “leading people into life-changing community in Christ,” according to founding pastor David Bailey. “We encourage people to mature from the inside-out,” he says. “That means you Center on God, Connect in relationship, then Change your world.”

            Since 2000, Crossroads has met in 10 different locations, including living rooms, the school gym, a nursing home and even a garage. The church now meets in an up-fitted warehouse on B & G Court in Stokesdale. “We never wanted to own real estate,” says Bailey, “but there is no assembly space available to rent in Stokesdale.”

            In those 16 years, the church has ministered to the community in many ways. Church members have coached sports teams, worked with scouts and participated in Good Samaritan Ministries events. For several years the church has provided refreshments and fun activities for families at the Stokesdale Holiday Parade. Members also serve as the parade announcers as the procession passes the Stokesdale Fire Station. “This is our church’s way of blessing the community every Christmas,” says Keith Street, one of the parade announcers. “We like to show people God’s love.”

            Crossroads has also reached out overseas with God’s love. In 2009 the church sent a team to Spanish Town, Jamaica to help missionaries with church building construction. In 2015 the church partnered with The Mighty River Project, sending a 12-person team to Uganda. The team met with Ugandan artisans who work for TMRP, which imports their crafts for sale in the U.S. Crossroads continues to work with this ministry which helps keep Ugandan families intact, through employment and providing health care.

Volunteers from Crossroads served at the Operation Christmas

Child Processing Center in Boone, NC in Dec. 2015.

            Every fall the church packs shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child, a ministry of Samaritan’s Purse. Last year the church sent 190 boxes, some of which were delivered to Belize. The church also sent a team of  23 to the Samaritan’s Purse processing center in Boone to prepare boxes for shipment overseas. “Samaritan’s Purse makes it incredibly easy to help bless children all around the world through Operation Christmas Child,” says Crossroads’ OCC leader Amy Strawn. “Crossroads pours out love to children around the world every year by such a simple act as packing a shoebox.”

            Locally, church members also work with Hannah’s Haven, a Teen Challenge substance abuse recovery program, and Jobs for Life, a course helping unemployed people find their way to gainful employment. The church partnered with the Kids’ Clubhouse after school program in Kernersville last summer, to bring a missions-themed Bible School program to dozens of energetic children.

            The past 16 years serve as a foundation for future ministry, says Bailey. One of the church’s home Bible study groups plans to begin ministering to refugees in 2016, working with The 514 Initiative in Greensboro.

            “It is such a joy to serve in this great community,” Bailey says. “We just need to celebrate!”

Core Values in a Sentence

We often need reminders.  The most important reminders bring us back to the most important matters.  Here are the core values of Crossroads, each condensed into one sentence.

Simplicity

We avoid clutter and complexity to remember that God has made us for relationship with himself and others.

Community

It is not good to be alone, so we embrace the joys and challenges of connecting our lives with others, reflecting the relationships within God himself—Father, Son, and Spirit.

 

Action

Life is more than theory, so we apply belief to life, living out the teachings of the good news in daily life and corporate ministry.

Joy

We choose gladness, as Jesus reminds us that he has overcome this world, releasing us to be fun and to have fun.

An Army at the Parade

Saturday was everything I could have hoped for. Well, I could have hoped for snow. But everything else was incredible. The people of Crossroads turned out en mass to serve the community of Stokesdale. And while we were working, we were having a great time!

We helped turn the Stokesdale Holiday Parade into an even bigger celebration. Sharing God’s love is a whole lot of fun. We gave away 700 hot dogs, lots of coffee, hot chocolate and desserts. People kept trying to pay for the food, and we kept explaining that we just wanted to share God’s love with them.

Our band played for a couple of hours before the parade, having a great time. We even played a set after the parade was over.

But during the parade, we provided the play-by-play for the floats as they passed by. Before the parade, we asked for info on all entries. Then from the stage, two of our folks did the Katie Couric, Matt Lauer routine. They added a new element of life to the whole event.

In fact, they did such a good job, they have been invited to do the same thing for a springtime parade nearby. All the responses we have received have been very encouraging.

I am so glad that our people served with such enthusiasm. We owe a debt of thanks to the people who built the stage, ran the sound, played the music, bought the food, prepared the food, served the food, welcomed the crowd, and announced the parade.

May Jesus be glorified as we share his love. May the songs we sang and the conversations we had give glory to him.

Life on a Mission

I was honored to hear a few Moravians address a small learning community on Friday. They shared with us some amazing history, which I had never heard. Count von Zinzendorf, living in the 1700s in Europe, founded a city named Herrnhut, a place of refuge for radical Christians who had lived in the eastern European mountains for generations.

After the refugees ironed out some conflicts, they became a great missionary village. Hundreds of Christ-followers left their homes to travel to foreign lands, earning a living with a simple trade. There they would live among society’s outcasts, serving them and loving them. They shared with them the call of Jesus to repentance and faith.

They were not seeking to begin Moravian churches, but to lead people to Jesus. They knew that they were likely never to return home, so they said their goodbyes, often at the western coast of Europe, and went to share Jesus with the world. One man even took his tombstone with him, ready to invest the rest of his life to share life with others.

Some of this may sound familiar to those of us in the Triad. Old Salem, which later became part of Winston-Salem, began as a Moravian outpost for evangelism. The various trades done in Salem raised money to support missionary efforts. They reached out to those without Christ in the new world.

There was no distinction between laity and clergy. They were all alike working to share the Savior’s love. The Count urged believers to “Win for the Lamb the reward of his suffering.” It’s all about Jesus.

Two things surprise me here. First, I’m surprised that I had never heard of this missionary enterprise. Of course I had heard of the Moravians, but they seemed like peripheral figures in church history. At the Baptist seminary I attended, I learned plenty about church history, and I even took a course on the Anabaptists. But I don’t recall ever hearing anything about the Moravians. And I know that I never heard about their radical missionary culture.

Second, I’m surprised that the effort did not endure. The missionary effort came to an end after Zinzendorf died. Although was of noble birth, he gave all he had materially to the cause. He also went deep into debt. After his death, the Moravians chose to stop the missions effort until they could repay the Count’s debt. They also chose to become a denomination. After the debt was paid, they never resumed the level of commitment to the great commission. And they were left with a denomination, an institution, a bureaucracy. And lots of church historians forgot them.

Maybe we could see a revival of this kind of radical obedience and sacrifice for the Lord. It will change the world.