CROSS Conference Podcast

Catherine Pratt is a North Carolina native. She met her husband, Zane, at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS). She served with Zane in Central Asia for twenty years. A short-term trip to the Muslim world with a student team from GCTS confirmed her prior calling to unreached people groups. Their two children were born in a mission hospital at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. Before leaving the States, Catherine worked in outreach family counseling.

Leeann Stiles has been active in ministry for over thirty years in a variety of capacities from directing short-term mission trips to writing and leading Bible studies for women. She and her husband, Mack, spent 15 years in the United Arab Emirates, where they spearheaded a ministry to university students and were involved in church reform and church planting. They currently live in Northern Iraq where Mack pastors an international church. The Stiles have three grown sons, two lovely daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.

John Piper offers a biography on the missionary David Brainerd.

This breakout was recorded at CROSS19.

David Platt led this breakout at CROSS19.

The final plenary session from CROSS19.

David Platt serves as pastor at McLean Bible Church in Washington, D.C. He is the founder and president of Radical, a resource ministry that serves churches in accomplishing the mission of Christ.

Books by David Platt include Radical, Radical Together, Follow Me,and Counter Culture, as well as the following volumes in the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series: Exalting Jesus in Matthew, Exalting Jesus in James, Exalting Jesus in 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, and Exalting Jesus in Galatians.

David Platt received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Along with his wife and four children, he lives in the Washington D.C. metro area.

The ninth plenary session from CROSS19.

Trip Lee is a recording artist with Reach Records and a pastor at Cornerstone Church in Atlanta. Trip was born and raised in Dallas, TX. He has appeared on numerous independent and national Christian hip-hop releases and has released several solo projects of his own, including: If They Only Knew (2007), 20/20 (2008), Between Two Worlds (2010) and The Good Life (2013), and Rise (2014). Recently, he authored Rise—a book that calls Christian to participate in God’s great story. Trip resides in Atlanta with his wife and their two kids.

The eighth plenary session from CROSS19.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church. He is the author of more than fifty books, and more than thirty years of his preaching and writing are available free of charge at desiringGod.org. John and his wife, Noël, have five children and twelve grandchildren.

The seventh plenary session from CROSS19.

Conrad Mbewe worked as a Mining Engineer in Zambia before answering God’s call into the pastoral ministry. Widely regarded as the African Spurgeon, Conrad is faithfully and powerfully proclaiming the Word of God from Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, since 1987. As well as pastoring, he maintains a full itinerant preaching ministry in different countries around the world and edits the Reformation Zambia magazine. Conrad volunteers with the YMCA, providing vocational training to the many unemployed youths in his community. He is married to Felistas, and has been wonderfully blessed with three children plus two foster daughters.

The sixth plenary session from CROSS19.

Pastor J.D. has led his church, the Summit Church, to make the gospel its central focus. The “gospel secret” is that all the things God wants for the Church, such as reckless joy, audacious faith, or radical generosity, are produced not by focusing on them but on what God has done for us. We become what God intends us to be when we focus less on what we are to do for him and more on what he has done for us. J.D. and his wife Veronica live in Raleigh and are raising four ridiculously cute kids: Kharis, Alethia, Ryah, and Adon.

J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is also a faculty member, writing on the correlations between early church presentations of the gospel and Islamic theology. Having lived serving among Muslims, he has a burden to see them, as well as every nation on earth, come to know and love the salvation of God in Christ.

Plenary Session 5 from CROSS19. Mack Stiles and his wife, Leeann, have traveled and lived many places before landing in Erbil, Iraq, in July 2017, including 15 years in Dubai, UAE. He’s the pastor of Erbil International Baptist Church.

CROSS19 Session Four — Zane Pratt is the Vice President of Training at the IMB, International Mission Board.