The Crossroads District of The Wesleyan Church has entered a new leadership season with the election of Reverend Dr. Chris Williams as district superintendent.
After serving in an interim capacity, Chris steps into the role with a good baseline sense of the district’s health and a good sight line to the work ahead. Over the past 11 months, Crossroads’ leaders have been focused on listening work: surveying pastors and ministry leaders through focus groups, online assessments and one-on-one conversations with pastors. People’s responses have been both encouraging and clarifying.
“We are a healthy district,” Chris said, and all the metrics seem to point in that direction: pastors feel engaged, the district has financial stability and there’s a growing commitment to leadership development across the district, with nearly 40% of the district’s lead pastors engaged in development cohorts. Churches whose pastors are participating in those cohorts are also reporting growth and Great Commission fruit on their local church statistical reports.
The district also enters this season with financial health and resources set aside for church multiplication and leadership development. In December 2025, Crossroads received a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to help build capacity for the future. Chris is quick to name the faithful leadership before him that helped make this season possible. “Our district has been very well led over the last decade under Dr. Mark Gorveatte,” Chris shared.
Looking forward, Chris believes the district is being invited into deeper connection and renewed mission. Through the listening process pastors expressed gratitude for their connection to district leadership while also naming a desire to feel more connected to one another.
Drawing from his own recent study of 1 Thessalonians, Chris has been struck by the way Paul describes the church as “a family, not just an organization.” Paul refers to his neighbors in the faith as mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters in Christ. That biblical image is shaping the way Chris thinks about district leadership in this season, too.
“The district is a family,” Chris said. “That means the pastors aren’t just meant to be names on a board; they’re meant to become dear to one another.”
That language has already begun to shape the way he visits churches across the district. Rather than speaking about the district as an administrative structure, he describes Crossroads as “a family of churches.”
“When I go to a church, I talk about the 102 congregations that make up this family we call the Crossroads District,” Chris stated. “I say, ‘I’m coming to bring greetings from your brothers and sisters in the other 101 congregations.’”
The family-centered mission also includes developing expressions of church that invite others to the table. While Crossroads has seen growth over the last decade, Chris believes the next question is not only whether more people are coming to church, but whether those people are being equipped as disciples and disciple makers.
“We have to stop just building the church,” Chris said, “and we have to start making disciples who can make disciples.”
Over the past decade, Crossroads has planted more churches than its two predecessor districts planted in the decade before merger. Chris celebrates that progress. But he also recognizes that most of those church plants were started or spearheaded by the central structure of the district.
“A district that plants churches from the district office is not scalable,” Chris stated. “We have to relocate church planting inside the local church.”
That shift could change the imagination of every district congregation. Rather than asking only what the district office can start, Chris wants local churches to ask, “Who is God raising up in our church to go and start the next kingdom expression?”
Those kingdom expressions may not begin with “parachute drops” with a production budget or a building; they may begin as simply as a dozen people gathered around a kitchen table, in a lunchroom, at a coffee shop or in a public library. They may begin with an open Bible and simple questions: Who is God? What is God saying to me? What is my next step of obedience?
Some of those kingdom expressions may eventually become churches; if even 20% of them did, the district would be incredibly missionally effective. For Chris, Crossroads’ future is not a district office doing ministry on behalf of churches. It is a family of churches equipping pastors, congregations and everyday disciples to join God’s mission together.
“If every church launched a new kingdom expression every year,” Chris said, “that becomes a multiplication engine we’ve never seen in our district.”
As he steps into this new role, Chris is grateful for the district’s health, clear-eyed about the challenges and hopeful about what God might do through a family of churches committed to making disciples and multiplying kingdom presence across Indiana and beyond.
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Rev. Ethan Linder is the pastor of discipleship at College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana.
