History
The vision for what has become Crossover Communications International first stirred in the heart of Bill Jones in the 1970s while he was an American exchange student in the former USSR. In 1987, Bill and fellow visionary João Mordomo founded Student Mission Impact to promote short term missions trips as an opportunity to stir others’ hearts toward missions and seeing God glorified among people needing to hear the gospel message.
The following few years would bring dramatic change for the world and Student Mission Impact. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw cataclysmic upheavals in the Communist world — the fall of the Berlin wall, the German unification, the freeing of Eastern bloc countries from Soviet domination, and, most breathtaking of all, the disintegration of the USSR. It was a time of unprecedented opportunity for ministry. That, coupled with a growing conviction that church planting was a vital aspect of world evangelization, led to a fundamental shift in both the name and the ministry of the agency. Student Mission Impact became Crossover Communications International, and transitioned from a mobilizing ministry focused on short term mission trips to an international missionary-sending agency. Without neglecting the important ministry of mobilizing American believers and helping them personalize the Great Commission through short-term trips, Crossover began to strategically establish spiritually healthy, self-multiplying churches in Eurasia.
The church planting work began in 1995 in the small, land-locked country of Moldova. The objective of this first phase, Mission Moldova, was to establish a church planting movement that would give birth to five new churches by the year 2000. By God’s hand, this phase surpassed itself with a harvest of six churches.
At the turn of the millennium, phase two, Mission Black Sea, was established to spread and support church planting movements among unreached people groups throughout the seven countries surrounding the Black Sea (Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova). Partnering with CCI-Brazil, a sister missions agency begun by Dr. Robert Silvado and João Mordomo in 1996, Crossover began working toward the establishment of 100 new churches within the region.
Throughout the years that followed Crossover saw the grace of God abound as the number of church plants grew almost exponentially. Our ministry reach expanded in 2005 with the addition of CCI – Australia and Petrus Nomos as our Vice President of International Ministries. In 2007 the mission field on Moldova began sending missionaries to neighboring countries and the support staff working there formed our newest sending base, CCI-Moldova. By God’s grace, our goal of 100 churches was accomplished in 2008 with 85 churches planted in Moldova and 15 churches planted in Siberia.
2009 brought a new phase to Crossover’s vision called Mission Ends of the Earth. This expansion of our work is not defined geographically but rather by the need to reach people who have never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel message of Jesus Christ. We seek to take the lessons we have learned from planting 100 churches in the Black Sea area and utilize them throughout central and southern Asia where an overwhelming number of unreached peoples live.