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 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 is working toward the establishment of 100
new churches within the region.
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