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CrossCreek Network was born from a local church’s passion to plant and support disciple-making, multiplying churches locally, nationally, and globally based on the model of Jesus’ ministry.
“There is a creek that runs through the middle of our campus, and every year when children move up to the student ministry, they ‘cross the creek,’” said Craig Etheredge, senior pastor of CrossCreek Church. “When students graduate from high school and move into college or adult ministry, they ‘cross the creek.’
“So, for us, crossing the creek has always meant moving into new territory, advancing to the next stage of growth.”
When it came time to name the church’s planting network more than five years ago, they called it CrossCreek Network “because this is how our church moves into new territory to take the gospel and plant disciple-making churches,” Etheredge said.
“Just as Joshua led the Israelites to cross the Jordan into the new territory they were to claim, we are moving into new places, even hard places, to take the gospel and make disciples who multiply,” he said. “It’s our missional ethos. It’s our identity as a church.”
CrossCreek takes the Great Commission “very personally and very seriously,” the pastor said, believing Jesus “will hold us accountable for what we did with what He placed in our hands.”
Clay Holcomb, executive director of CrossCreek Network, said the goal is to establish 14 disciple-making, church planting hubs around the world and to see those hubs multiply.
“For example, we have a church-planting hub in West Africa. They run the strategy from West Africa because they’re in West Africa. We’re not in West Africa,” Holcomb said. “We have a great partnership with them, a great relationship and philosophical alignment. We have covenants, and there’s infrastructure and systems that go into that.”
The point, Holcomb said, is that church members in Colleyville can “fuel local movements of disciple-making church planting around the world,” including in Zambia, Burkina Faso, Israel, and Canada, as well as in New York, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Fort Worth.
CrossCreek trains planters in those locations “to not only be effective church planters but also to be effective disciple-makers,” Holcomb said. In addition to training events on the field, the church invites its planters to Colleyville multiple times per year.
For one of the visits, CrossCreek asks the planters to bring along two or three team members for training. “They get full access to our staff for two days,” Holcomb said. Whether they want to learn about operations, children’s ministry, disciple-making, or simply to ask questions of Etheredge, the door is open.
Meanwhile, CrossCreek members are busy throughout the year interacting with church-planting teams around the world. They have a list of birthdays for each family and send packages for kids or write cards to the planters. Teams from the church go on mission trips to the specific locations, learn about their efforts, and develop relationships.
For example, Holcomb recently headed to New York and Las Vegas with “a bunch of bags” in the back of his truck to show planters in those locations that the members of CrossCreek care about them. His wife was going with him to host special nights out for the planter wives in those cities.
Close to home, Biju Satpathy and his wife Tiki are working to plant churches among Indians and Nepalis in DFW. The couple has been faithfully pursuing the Indian community and other ethnicities, Holcomb said, adding that the church has participated in several lunch gatherings at a nearby university that has a large population of Indian students.
“A lot of students would come out to [those lunch gatherings], and they would serve Indian food, and it was great,” Holcomb said. “It’s very evangelistic. … Biju would make a lot of connections with them there.”
Jesus’ ministry in the gospels is a model for how to raise up disciples and plant churches, Holcomb said. “We don’t mean that in theory. We mean practically.”
The first phase of Jesus’ ministry was to engage the community, Holcomb said, by making His way among the people, getting to know individuals, and going to parties such as the wedding at Cana.
“Almost half of His ministry was in that phase of making connections,” Holcomb said. “So, for a planter, the way it looks practically is it might take you a year to two years to be in your community long enough to build that kind of trust … before you can start to do something as profound and impactful as starting a church.”
The big vision of CrossCreek Network is highly motivational for CrossCreek Church, Etheredge said.
“Since we have made it our focus to reach out—planting around the world as well as right here in our own neighborhoods—our people have answered the call,” Etheredge said. “Big vision calls us out of self-indulgence to a greater purpose. Our people see God at work, and they know they’ve had a part in it.”
