ANNA: Where did you live before you moved with your family to Vancouver?
JEFF AND SARA: South Haven, Miss., right outside of Memphis.
ANNA: What do you enjoy most about your church, The Crossings?
JEFF: I think right now it’s our friendships. We had five families move from the states to Vancouver and then we had some other people who joined us locally. There’s a real sense of family.
SARA: I enjoy being around a lot of non-Christians. It’s been fun seeing their reactions to what we do and that they’re not offended by it or anything like that, but they’re just interested and intrigued that we would move all that way for what we believe in.
ANNA: How many people are involved in your church plant?
JEFF: We have 16 adults and 12 kids involved in The Crossings.
ANNA: How many people come to The Crossings each time you guys meet?
JEFF: During our weekly meetings in our home we usually have between 20 and 30 people. But we also have a monthly worship service where we meet with our friends from a Korean church, an Iranian church and a Russian church. We call it an All Nations Gathering. We’ve found that partnering with these pastors helps us to love and be involved in the lives of people from many other nations. We have about 100 who attend that gathering each month.
ANNA: What countries do people come from to Vancouver?
JEFF: There are people from more than a 150 nations living in Vancouver. Our son, Ty, has 18 kids from 13 nations in his kindergarten class. And our daughter, Emma, who’s your age, she has close friends from Spain, Poland, Bosnia, Serbia and Russia, and they all speak the language of the their countries with their families, but they speak English with Emma.
ANNA: When did the church start? When did you have your first gathering?
JEFF: We moved to Vancouver in April 2010. It was right after the Olympics. We started meeting in September as a small group in our home. In November we had our first All Nations gathering. We still haven’t begun our weekly services yet, so we’re still working on that.
ANNA: What activities are The Crossings doing to tell other people about Jesus?
JEFF: Our biggest thing right now is building relationships. Canadians, and especially Vancouverites, need to know you love them and that you are friends with them. When they have this trust, then they open up and listen to what you have to say. We’re encouraging our team to build relationships. Believe it or not, the number one way we meet people and build those relationships is through our kids. Since our kids are in school, we get to meet the parents of our kids’ classmates. I coach my son’s baseball team, so I meet moms and dads doing that. I also coach 5th-grade basketball at my children’s school, so we’re meeting families through that, too. A lot of times we meet families because our children are making friends.
26 Fall 2011 •
onmission.com
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