Excited about Church Planting Momentum in the Atlanta Area

Crosspoint/Encuentro is part of some significant Kingdom expansion work you would seldom see. Today I went to our monthly Church Planters Network (CPN) meeting and there were 40 church planters, coaches and visitors. This represents almost 20 church plants in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, London and Bucharest. We are usually mostly white, middle-aged and Presbyterian, but today I looked around the room and saw five racial backgrounds, young guys and old guys. 40!

Several men from Bethlehem Baptist Church Minneapolis (where John Piper is the pastor) checked out what we are doing here. We had visitors from the London Church Planters' Network some of our men helped start and even a church planter from Romania! It was so cool to hear him say straight up that he and a few other pastors from the International Presbyterian Church in Romania are making plans to change their whole country through church planting. Seriously. I believe it.

Ten months out of the year, though you may not know it, I spend a day (630am-230pm) in Atlanta with this network. Pastor Hector too. I used to go to receive, now I go to give back. I coach other church planters who have started churches on the Atlanta Westside, in Vinings and East Atlanta.

Every month there is peer-coaching, prayer and training. This month's training and prayer time inter-weaved as Dr. Tom Wood and Alex Villasana led us in strong, gospel-centered life-changing interaction. I'm so proud of Tom and Alex, he's the guy that recruited, trained and still mentors me. And Alex just preached at Sunday night at the Regional Hispanic Worship Gathering for the four Hispanic churches in our area.

And I heard that J. Allen Thompson, the church planting guru of the PCA and Redeemer NYC is moving back here. My guess is so he can be closer to family and Cuba where he frequently travels to train church planters and church leaders where he was born, raised, planted churches and got kicked out in 1960.

Why tell you all this? A lot of reasons:
It's personal. Crosspoint/Encuentro is one of the first three church plants from this network.Without these men and this training I would have flopped more than once at church planting.
It's spiritual. This is the kind of momentum we have been asking the Lord of the harvest for and working towards for ten years.
It's missional. Our church vision has always been to multiply churches for all the nations because it is God's ordained method to saturate the world, Atlanta and Smyrna with the gospel.
It's eternal. Alongside godly people doing ground-breaking work in the 21st century, we will have continuing impact long after we pass into eternity.
It's global. This behind-the-scenes work is the greatest opportunity for the most people in the most places to worship King Jesus.

We are so honored to take part in this world-changing enterprise!