We are so excited that you have taken the time to come to our site. We hope you find it informative and helpful! We are the Crabtree family, church planting missionaries in New York City. For five years, we lived and ministered in Athens, Greece (a diverse urban center with a population with more than 5 million residents). Government turmoil and residency restrictions forced us to leave the country.
Our ultimate goal in NYC is to start multiple autonomous Baptist churches capable of equipping English and Greek speaking New Yorkers for the work of the Lord (via discipleship) and sending them into the harvest (both locally and globally).
Please take a look around this site and get to know us a little better. Inside you will learn a little bit more about us and you will see our burden, vision, and plan. Please feel free to sign up for our newsletter. We send it out by email every month.
We hope that our ministry will bring glory to God by helping people experience life change through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There are a lot of details that go into church-planting. Some of those details are theological, some are philosophical, and some reflect our personality.
Why do we want to start new churches?
Simply put, we love the local church. We love seeing God change people’s lives and the local church is the primary means through which He has chosen to accomplish His mission. We passionately desire to establish churches that introduce people to the power of the Gospel and that carefully helps them live lives that are consistent with it. We love God and we love the church and there is nothing that we would rather give our lives to.
Why have you chosen NYC?
The five years we spent in Athens, Greece shaped our passion to see major metropolitan areas reached with the good news of Jesus Christ. NYC is a melting pot of people from all over the world…many speaking different languages. It is said that on a given day, business is done in 180 different languages. If we are serious about reaching the world with the Gospel, then our focus must be this major metropolitan area and others like it (Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Toronto, Tokyo, Beijing, London, Paris, Johannesburg and many others).
After losing our final appeal for residency in Greece, we were forced to leave the country. After investing countless hours into studying the Greek culture and language, it was clear to us that God was moving us to a place where we could CONTINUE the ministry that He called us to do many years ago. The NYC metro area has over 130,000 Greeks, making it the world’s largest Greek immigrant community.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just minister in an already existing church?
The reality is that there are wonderful Gospel proclaiming churches in NYC and the metro area. We consider the men and women that make up those churches brothers and sisters in Christ and we are thankful for the work that they are doing for the Lord. As a result of their efforts, many people have come to know Christ and are growing in their walk with Him.
With that being said, there is still a great need for more churches. The metro area has a population that exceeds 21,000,000 people. There are 6,000 total places of worship that fall into the large “Christian” category (3,600 are Catholic and 2,400 are Protestant) that serve the total population. If every New Yorker wanted to worship on a given Sunday, each church would have to find a place to seat 3,500 people. Most churches have a seating capacity well under this number. New churches are needed!
NYC is the home to 1.5 million Muslims, over 1,000 mosques, and to more than 1,000 Jewish synagogues. There are more synagogues in NYC than there are in Jerusalem. In the multi-ethnic neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, more churches are needed to serve the non-English speaking New Yorkers. We passionately desire to see God change lives and we pray that He will use us as an instrument in that process.