A Love Letter to Phoenix

Here I am posting these words the week before my last Sunday at Cross Church Phoenix as their Campus Pastor. For the past 8+ years, I have had the wonderful privilege of pastoring this congregation and seeing God do amazing things often in spite of my leadership rather than because of it. In this short blog, I want to just write my scattered thoughts as I reflect on the amazing journey God allowed me to be a part of and share my thoughts about how much I love this congregation.

The Picture

In 2015, I met Jackie Allen, Lead Pastor of Palm Vista Church in Surprise, AZ where God sovereignly opened a door of opportunity that I’m not sure any of us understood what the other side looked like. I had a burden on my heart and a calling for my life at 15 years old one summer that was confirmed by respected leaders in my life at Youth Camp to go into ministry. What that looked like, I had no idea, but I always knew it would entail seminary, so I decided to get my undergrad from Arizona State University which landed me a job in HR Management at Target. As I am sitting across from Jackie as a young professional with no ministry experience but a heart to do God’s work, I hear a vision, I see a picture to take Palm Vista multi-site with another campus in North Phoenix.

The Place

In the 1970s, Valley Heights Baptist Church was planted on the corner of 19^th Ave and Grovers. What once was a thriving local Southern Baptist Church sadly had to close its doors in the 2010s, this led to a revolving door of churches coming and going until the property was offered to Palm Vista. What would soon launch as Palm Vista Phoenix in the Spring of 2016 would become the 6^th church in 5 years on that campus. Something about the transient nature of the community along with the loss of trust by the many churches in and out had left that corner an unstable place. What I knew would be an uphill battle of just starting a church, I underestimated how hard it would be in an established property with an unstable past.

The Process

No one at Palm Vista had started a campus of the same church, no one had multi-site experience, and I didn’t even know how to pastor people and barely could craft a sermon. We had plans, and we had expert church planters in our church, but this was all new for our Phoenix team and new for our Surprise team to be doing it from a distance. Over the next 8+ years, we moved from launching a plane in mid-air to realizing there were a lot of missing parts to discovering those parts and launching two domestic planes (Cornville, El Mirage) and two international ones (Myanmar, Philippines). In those years, we crafted Vision and Mission statements, changed our name to Cross Church, created a playbook for campuses, and created a central support system to make it all happen. Did we always know what we were doing at Phoenix? Absolutely not, but trusted the process and knew we were a part of something bigger under the Cross Church banner, something bigger that could Make Jesus Known to a greater degree than we could alone

The People

What ultimately turned Cross Church Phoenix from an unstable building on a dark corner to a light on a hill spreading joy and truth was the people. The place was always going to be hard, and the process was always going to take time to figure out, but we needed the right people to make that corner a gathering of God’s Church.

I love the people of Cross Church Phoenix who have loved me and loved my family so well. I started as a 25-year-old newly married "boy" who couldn’t preach and didn’t know how to pastor people and am leaving a 33-year-old happily married, father of 4 kids who learned to exposit God’s Word and lovingly pastor his people.

I could write for pages of all the names of those who made our church a place of warmth, who served in ministries, who gave their time and energy to love our community, and who supported me with a smile when I had dumb ideas that didn’t work. I love my Cross Church Phoenix congregation, my first church, my first people, who allowed me to be their Pastor, allowed me to share the burden on my heart for Jesus, and allowed me to be myself along the way.

The Prayer for the Future

As I transition from our Phoenix Campus to our Surprise Campus, I have an eager expectation of what God is going to continue to do across all our campuses. I have been praying expectantly that Phoenix doesn’t take a step back, but that the next season of the church that gathers on 19^th Ave and Grovers is greater in every way than the previous. That more people will celebrate in baptisms, more families will dedicate their children, more schools will feel loved by their local church, more marriages will be restored by the Gospel, more truth will be proclaimed in the sanctuary, more friendships will be formed in the lobby, and more light will shine in Phoenix than we have ever seen before.

Thank you Cross Church Phoenix for loving me and allowing to love and pastor you.