People of Peace

We LOVE East Leeds and want to see it flourish in all areas!

Crossgates Community is a faith community of around 15-25 people including new Christians and those exploring faith.

In Jan 2020, Karen Gray, visited India with the Yorkshire Baptist Association to learn about the BigLife model for church growth and discipleship. This simple framework has seen phenomenal growth where seekers become believers, then disciples, and finally disciple-makers.

Our aim is to apply this model to our local context through a new initiative “People of Peace”

BigLife uses a flexible framework of “Three Thirds” (3/3) meetings.

This enables followers of Jesus to share their faith with others and apply it in their own lives, holding them accountable through a small group and the use of simple “discovery style” questions as they read the Bible together. Members develop their ability to share with others, their story including their day-to-day encounters with God. We have found it very effective with our community since we began in Spring 2020.

Looking forwards, rather than trying to grow the church community as one group by addition, we plan to form multiple groups. Rather than inviting seekers to attend an unfamiliar venue with strangers, BigLife encourages us to instead search for “people of peace” and then go to them, creating church communities around them. (See Luke 10) Our vision is to see new groups form around them and their interested friends/colleagues/neighbours. We work in close partnership with local charity Connecting Crossgates to help people who are interested in exploring faith find ways to do so.

We anticipate these small groups will form networks, which are mutually supportive of one another through one-to-one discipleship, as well as large and small gatherings, allowing leaders to emerge and to support each other. We are keen to help inspire and equip others to explore this model regionally and nationally.

In India, the Biglife approach has led to over 200,000 new disciples of Jesus in less than 20 years.
What if this were to happen here too?