Voices of the EFCA: Why Transformation Matters with Philip Abode

Last month (March 2025), I traveled with EFCA district superintendents to north Tulsa, Oklahoma, to visit Philip Abode and Crossover Bible Church (EFCA). During the last 20 years, Pastor Philip and his team at Crossover have implemented a transformational vision for north Tulsa, drastically impacting their community with the gospel.

After launching on Easter 2006, Crossover started a non-profit (Crossover Community Impact) to meet real needs in north Tulsa through a variety of transformational ministries, including a community center, health clinic, building development company, and an all-boys and all-girls school.

While in north Tulsa, I sat down with Pastor Philip to unpack the importance of transformation in the EFCA (i.e., our mission statement), Philip's own story and Crossover's ministry in north Tulsa. Below you can find a brief excerpt from our conversation, which is available on YouTube.

The gospel flows through relationships (excerpt)

Carlton: How did your heart for transformation influence the ministry here at Crossover and its subsequent community impact on north Tulsa?

Philip: It goes back to looking at the brokenness of our community. All communities are broken at a certain level, but just how it manifests itself here in our community, where over 60 percent of our kids are born to unwed mothers—and the chances of you having kids out of wedlock go up when you grow up out of wedlock. It's just how these cycles of poverty and brokenness continue to perpetuate themselves. I was on that same path, and then I realized the gospel is what broke that cycle in my life. I was like, "This is really the key. The gospel can break that cycle better than anything that I know of." [When we started Crossover, we said], "Okay, let's have this solid church—gospel-proclaiming, teaching the Bible solidly"—but we realized early on that we can have a great Sunday morning program, and that only matters to the people that come on Sunday mornings. So it was like, "How do we get the gospel to folks that have no intention of coming on a Sunday morning? "

I had done the whole cold-turkey evangelism stuff, and that wasn't effective, in my opinion. Learning how to share your faith is effective when it comes to learning how to share your faith, but people have to know how much you care before they care how much you know. And so it was like, "Okay, we have the answer. We have the solutions in the gospel, but we have a group of folks that aren't going to come to us to hear it. How do we take the gospel out to the people? How do we tangibly build relationships with folks through serving them and connecting with them?" I'd like to say we were able to figure all this out, but God dumped a ministry opportunity in our laps. Through coaching a youth football team at the community center where we met, we got to see, "This is how we can build relationships with families. This is how we get to have some deep, meaningful conversations with people." Because I'm not an outgoing guy. It wasn't like I could just go and sit in a coffee shop or something like that and just build relationships.

Carlton: That's not you. 

Philip: Yeah, that's just not my personality. But I did know football, and coaching football and caring for the kids is what created some bridges to be able to have deep relationships and conversations with people.

Carlton: I've been able to visit you here in the community and see some of the things you're doing in the community. For example, you have some of your people who actually live in proximity to the church in the community here in north Tulsa.

Philip: The gospel flows through relationships, and proximity is huge when it comes to relationships. When we're talking about doing ministry and serving in an underresourced community, the fact that we're a part of this community, too, speaks volumes, especially when you look at our diversity as a church. It says a lot when you have a white guy who lives next door to you in a community that a lot of people were trying to get out of. It's like, "Oh, wow, he must really care because he's here," and so having folks move into the community has been a game-changer for us. We do require that of our full-time staff—because when we say restoring "our" community, we want that to literally be true. But we've also seen a lot of our church members doing it, even though it's not required. They see the value of being able to connect with your next-door neighbors, and your kids playing with their kids, and the relationships that happen from just being present in the community.

Carlton: And that can happen in any community that we find ourselves in as Free Church people, whether it's in the suburbs, in north Tulsa, or out in a rural community. Wherever we are, we can leverage those relationships for the sake of the gospel.

An encouragement and a challenge

We thank God for the transformational work happening in and through Crossover Bible Church as well as the transformation happening in EFCA churches across the country.

I pray Philip's story can provide not only an encouragement, but also a challenge—to ask ourselves the same question the Crossover team asked themselves when they planted their church back in the mid-2000s:

If our church were to close its doors today, never to open them again, would anyone in the community notice?