The Crete Collective exists to establish gospel-driven churches in distressed and neglected Black and Brown communities.
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planted in Baltimore-Washington D.C. area between 2011-2017 located in Black and Brown communities.
black & brown people in the U.S. are underserved by their church community.
The Church invests significant effort in planting new churches and revitalizing failing ones across the United States. But there remain ethnic and poor communities largely untouched by this gospel work.
While we need missionaries in every country and churches planted in every community, we believe some of the Church’s effort must focus on those who are left out and overlooked. One study found[1] that between 2011-17 there were 220 church plants in the greater Baltimore-Washington, D.C. metro area. Of those, approximately 60 served congregations whose primary language was not English. Of the 160 church plants remaining, only three were in communities of concentrated need with concentrated numbers of ethnic minorities.
We’re doing great at planting churches. We’re doing great at serving international and diverse populations. We’re doing a good job of planting in the redeveloped and gentrified areas of cities. However, the Church is not doing so great at planting or revitalizing churches in poor predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods.
Our work begins with the belief that churches can do more together than they can apart. So, we hope to involve like-minded churches in The Crete Collective to pool investments of prayer, relationships, finances, and wisdom to impact our focus communities by God’s grace.
We cannot reach a people we do not live with. To bring the gospel nearer to more people, we need biblically-sound, gospel-spreading churches in the community to move into neglected neighborhoods.
Because the people we hope to reach face an avalanche of physical, financial, and social need, we recognize churches will need to commit themselves to acts of mercy as well as advocate for neighbors in need. So, we aim to plant churches that care for both the spiritual and temporal needs of their neighbors as the Bible teaches.
The aim of Crete Collective churches is to reach residents in defined local areas. We long for Crete Collective churches to represent a return of persons, social capital, and resources to neglected localities. Long-term, we want leadership and membership of local churches to be indigenous to the neighborhood.
America is diversifying faster than analysts have predicted. Nearly four of 10 Americans is ethnic minority. The 2010 to 2020 decade will be the first in the nation’s history in which the white population declined in numbers. In 2019, for the first time, more than half of the nation’s population under age 16 identified as a racial or ethnic minority. Source: U.S. Census
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Members of the news media who want to cover the work of The Crete Collective should email: john@thecretecollective.org