WHO WE ARE

History & Core Beliefs

History of Crossroads

Crossroads Community Church is one church with many locations — connecting people with God across the country. We were originally incorporated as “Elkhart First Church of the Nazarene” in 1919, when 37 charter members met to worship in a large room above Woolworth’s Dime Store on Main Street, in Elkhart, IN.  It was a small group who believed strongly in the church’s teaching of living a life fully surrendered to God.  

This group grew to a congregation of 175 and built their first building in 1924 on Scott Street near Elkhart General Hospital. In 1962 the congregation moved to building constructed at the corner of Benham & Hively in order to have an impact on the thousands of people who lived and worked in the surrounding neighborhoods. 

In 1995, after many years maximizing the church’s limited space, the Board made the difficult decision to sell the property and relocate. This move was driven by the vision to reach more people for God in the changing culture. After meeting at Concord Middle School for several years, a search committee identified 38 acres of property on County Road 17, which today makes up our Goshen Campus and the Crossroads Professional Park. Our Goshen Campus was completed in 2002 with an addition in 2006. God has honored the steps of faith that have been taken. Crossroads has grown from a group of 75 people that met at Concord Middle School to 2,500 people gathering each week at our Goshen, Mishawaka, and St. Pete Campuses.

Today, our mission stays the same. We exist to Connect People With God and we are focused on inviting thousands of outsiders to a changed life. Our goal is to see 1,000 people celebrate their changed lives through baptism by 2025 and we are excited to see what God is going to do as the next chapter of our story unfolds.

WHAT WE BELIEVE

  • The Church of the Nazarene is a Protestant Christian church in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition. Organized in 1908, the denomination is now home to about 2.3 million members worshipping in more than 29,000 local congregations in 159 world areas.

  • As members of the global Church, we join with all believers in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord and affirm the historic creeds and beliefs of the Christian faith. We value our Wesleyan-Holiness heritage and believe it to be a way of understanding the faith that is true to Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience.

  • God, who is holy, calls us to a life of holiness - He wants us to become more like Him!  We believe that the Holy Spirit seeks to do in us a second work of grace, bringing us to a place of full surrender where God sanctifies us, empowers us to love Him with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and produces in us the character of Christ.

  • Responding to the call of Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to go into all the world, we are witnesses to the power of Jesus Christ and participants with God in the building of His Church. Through worship, evangelism, compassion, and Christian higher education, we equip people to become more like Jesus.

    • We believe in one God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    • We believe in Jesus Christ, who being one with the Father, became like us to bring about our salvation.

    • We believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it contains all truth necessary for faith and Christian living.

    • We believe that man is born with a fallen nature and that we need God’s forgiveness for our sin.

    • We believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again, and that by believing in Him, anyone can be forgiven and restored to a right relationship with God.

    • We believe that when we are forgiven, the old record of sin is wiped clean, and we are born again, becoming part of the family of God.

    • We believe that God calls us to be entirely sanctified, and that through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can live victorious lives of freedom with hearts fully surrendered to Him.

    • We believe that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the new birth, and also to the entire sanctification of believers.

    • We believe that those who have placed their faith in Jesus will have an eternal home with Him in heaven, and that those who reject Him will be hopelessly and eternally lost.

    • We believe that Jesus will return, the dead will rise, and the final judgment will take place.