As we reach the end of 2025, and as we wrap up the “Crossing 25 Years Together” series we’ve been presenting this year, I’d like to end with a look to the next 25 years that God has for The Crossing. While this year has been a reflection on what God has done, I’d now like to look forward prayerfully and expectantly to what God will continue to do in and through our church. What should we ask God to do in and through The Crossing these next 25 years?
Here are 10 things I pray that The Crossing would see these next 25 years. Would you join me in praying for them too?
- That The Crossing would be the kind of place that changes the way more and more people think about Jesus Christ and the way they think about Christians. That, as our members continue to grow as disciples of Jesus, they will “shine as lights in the world” (Phil 2:15) and in our city. That, as the growing disciples of Jesus in our church work in our community, they are involved in kids’ activities with other families, and as they build friendships with the tens of thousands in our community who don’t know much about Jesus and what a real Jesus follower is other than cultural stereotypes, I pray that thousands of people outside the church would become true disciples of Jesus in his church.
While we’ve seen this already these past 25 years, the next 25 years could multiply these stories in surprising and miraculous ways! Let’s pray for it.
- That The Crossing would be a place where, when new people enter on Sundays, they will experience a worshiping community of loving and welcoming people. People who cherish the special opportunity to worship together and serve together. People who invite the new and uncertain visitor into their space and comfort them with their kindness.
- That The Crossing would be a refugee community to our increasingly lonely and atomized culture. A place where lonely people can come and belong and learn to believe with us. That, at The Crossing, those who are single would have a family to belong.
- That, at The Crossing, boys and men would find the kind of brotherhood all men seek. That boys and men would find the challenge, purpose, and courage for which they were created by God.
- That, at The Crossing, girls and women would know the true beauty and worth that comes by being filled with God’s Spirit. That their faces would glimmer with God’s love and joy and kindness and humble confidence because they know they are wanted and cherished by Christ.
- That parents would find partners who help their kids traverse a seductive and devastating culture.
- That, at The Crossing, teenagers would find a more persuasive and convincing answer to who they are and how to find love and joy than the empty messages of our increasingly confused and nihilistic culture.
- That kids would be equipped to become adults who lead with humility, strength, love, and courage in our church and our community.
- That Mid-Missouri would view The Crossing as a reputable place they can trust to find help when they need better answers to life’s bigger questions. And that they would think first of The Crossing as the place to go as a community resource with reliable help.
- That The Crossing would be known in our community as the place where everybody’s welcome, nobody’s perfect, and somebody always cares.
Amen.