Crossroads Church Kansas City

As you might recall, back in June we were meeting outside and reminding our people that being the church didn’t require a building. Then the Arts Incubator reopened its doors after a two week closure, and we thought our weekly services were back on track.

But without warning, a week later the Arts Incubator closed for good.

There was no press release, just a final board meeting, and the Incubator, one of downtown’s anchor art destinations, was dissolved due to financial issues.

You can read some of my thoughts on that here.

Our community was shocked, as were the Incubator’s other artists and tenants. Within a few days, we were moving our equipment to a corner of my basement. I told our folks, “God may want to keep us light on our feet for awhile. We don’t need a weekly service to love and serve our community.”

Our plan was to continue meeting in homes as City groups indefinitely.

In the meantime, I shot an email to Dave Sullivan, the director of another downtown nonprofit, ArtsTech, and asked him if their space got much traffic on Sundays. ArtsTech uses the arts to mentor at-risk high school students, and we knew Dave because a few of us had volunteered at a fundraiser late in 2010.

A couple days later, Dave and I sat down for coffee and I explained our predicament. Within 30 minutes, he had offered me a set of keys to the ArtsTech building.

As shocked as I was when the Arts Incubator closed its doors, seeing the doors to ArtsTech swing open may have been a bigger surprise.

Mere days after telling our crowd that Crossroads was going underground for the foreseeable future, I was updating them again: Hey…apparently God wants us to keep having these informal services after all.

You can’t make this stuff up. We’re deeply grateful to be at ArtsTech, and we see it as an ideal staging area for Crossroads, because we’re embedded in the arts community, serving our city, and surrounded by people we can love and befriend.

However, we don’t believe a visible church service is the barometer of our success. More important are the roots we sink downtown for the long haul, the neighbors we know by name, and the number of people who are encountering Jesus through our lives and words.

Steven and Abbey bought a 100-year-old house by downtown, moved in, and started renovating. They’re expecting their first baby, but they’ll stay in the city, keep having people over, and continue to make their front porch a living room for neighbors.

Ruth, Anne and Bethany share an apartment by the Crossroads District because they want real community. They invite friends into their circle, host parties, and see their career tracks in marketing and medicine as missionary callings.

John and Hailey moved into the city because they wanted to be at ground zero. John found a job in the Crossroads District and bikes to work. In the evenings, they can watch the downtown sunset from a deck they share with neighbors.

This incarnational,“moving into the neighborhood” is a slower work, but thanks to the Spirit, it’s happening. We’re thankful for the growing number of friends we have downtown, the handful who have met Jesus, and the growing number of people who are having their imaginations stirred by a Jesus they don’t yet know.

We’d appreciate your prayers for more of the same.

Tags: artstech, downtown kansas city

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 at 2:18 PM and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.