By 1979, it had becomeclear to most people in and out of the Crossroads movement that the Crossroads methodsdid not work well in most established Churches of Christ. Time and again, churches withCrossroads-based campus ministries split or suffered severe problems because of them.So Kip McKean decided to try something different. He found a tiny, dying Church ofChrist in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts which agreed to allow him to rebuild it fromthe ground up using the Crossroads methods. It agreed to give him and his team fullauthority to do this, and the Boston Church of Christ was founded.Through the early 1980s, the Boston Church of Christ grew and grew until its growth rateoutstripped, not only the Churches of Christ as a whole, but all the other disciplingmovement churches as well. It also began planting churches of its own -- New York in1981, Chicago and London in 1982, and several more churches in various parts of theworld in the following couple of years.In each case, a "team" of people trained in Boston, including an evangelist and usuallysome interns, was sent to the new city. The evangelist and (in a few cases) one or twoother people were on staff and their salaries paid from Boston, but the other team memberswere required to find work and pay their own expenses. Early in the 1980s team memberswere volunteers. Later on, team members were picked by the church leaders -- theynominally could choose whether to accept their "calling" or not, but in practice were indeep trouble if they refused. This basic pattern of church planting has remained unchangedthrough the present.By 1982 Boston had supplanted Crossroads as the real center of the discipling movement.Crossroads continued to plant churches, but soon the Boston-planted churches in NewYork, Chicago and London were themselves planting churches throughout the world. Newmissions teams were forming constantly, urged on by Kip McKean's charismatic andemotional sermons urging peopl...
