Looking For That Aha Moment
What is Crossings?
When you know a lot about the Christian faith but still don’t get how good it is for you, Crossings can help.
There’s an age-old question that haunts people today, and always will: how do we lead lives of value that count as “worthy”?
We’ve all felt it. This sense of unrest deep within—this unrelenting pressure to know more, be more, do more until others are satisfied, or until we’re satisfied with ourselves.
But what if you responded to this pressure by trusting Christ’s promise to handle it for you, with not a single thing left that you have to do to wind up worthy? How would this change your life from day to day?
This promise of Christ is God’s Good News. At Crossings, we’ve found that when this clicks with people, they’re hooked for life.
But how did it all begin?
In the early 1970s two seminary professors in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, listened to the plea of some lay Christians. “Can you help us live out our faith in the world of daily work?” they asked. “Can you help us connect Sunday worship with our lives the other six days of the week?” That is how Crossings was born. It is a community of Christians studying both the Word of God and life experiences in order to bring them together, to make them “cross.”
The Crossings Community, Inc. is an open worldwide network of Christians dedicated to connecting the Word of God and daily life under the motto, “Crossing Life with the Promise of Christ.” What makes our approach distinctive is our commitment to a theological outlook called the proper distinction of law and Gospel.
We regard the Gospel as a problem-solving message — genuine good news for sinners — and the Holy Scriptures as problem-solving literature. In a nutshell, we believe that the Gospel and the Scriptures address a festering God-problem that is in, with and under all our other problems, and for which only the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the corresponding God-solution.
The word “crossings” has a double meaning for us: one theological and one pastoral. Theologically, it reminds us that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s solution to our God-problem. Through Christ, God establishes the bridge for us to cross over from life under Law to life in Christ, from sin to righteousness, from death to life. Pastorally, it reminds us that God’s solution needs to be personally connected to our lives. Through the Word and the Holy Spirit, God takes what is Christ’s and applies it to us. Through Word and the Spirit, we crossover from fear of judgment to faith in Christ, confident that our sin is covered by Christ’s forgiveness and convinced that love is established as our way of life.
The mission of the Crossings Community is to serve people in “crossing” their lived experiences with the promise of Christ to see how their stories fit within the Gospel story. To this end, the Crossings Community has developed a three-fold method of study called the Crossings Method.
+ We read the Bible to hear, first, how the Law of God evaluates (diagnosis) life’s ills, ultimately as they relate to God, and, second, how the Good News of Jesus Christ provides healing (prognosis). This we call the “Grounding.”
+ We examine daily life in a way that keeps us honest to the facts and mindful of how we’ve already been grounded in scripture. This we call the “Tracking.”
+ We relate the two so that, by the power of the Word and the Spirit, faith in God flourishes and service to the world abounds. This we call the “Crossing.”
Central to the Crossings Method is the art of distinguishing law and Gospel, God’s two contrasting ways of addressing the human condition. Through the word of law, God exposes all that is wrong with us in the give and take of daily life, especially our relationship with God; through the word of Gospel, God promises to make all things right for us by joining us to the death and resurrection of Christ.
We invite you to join us in the Christian art of “crossing life with the promise of Christ.”
If you’re new to Crossings, please visit our Start Here Page.
