West Allegheny to Host Gold Card Club Holiday Breakfast

BY DOUG HUGHEY
PHOTOS SUBMITTED
Over the past twenty years,
Crossroads United Methodist
Church in Oakdale has been
growing in popularity, to the
point that last Christmas Eve it
had to turn away churchgoers
after its 300-seat sanctuary filled
to capacity. That’s despite
offering eight services.
Crossroads shouldn’t have
that same problem this year,
however, as it just finished a $4.5
million construction project that
includes an additional, 600-seat
sanctuary to accommodate
worshipers seeking out its
contemporary brand of service.
With high-tech video, lighting,
and sound recording equipment
rivaling that of a concert venue,
plans this Christmas Eve are to
broadcast services down the hall
to its old sanctuary, thereby
raising its capacity to 900. On
any given weekend, the church
attracts about 1,300 people
between three different services. So that might just be enough
space; assuming, of course, that members don’t decide to show
up from any of the church’s other three branches in Cranberry,
Bridgeville, and East Liberty. Combined, those campuses account
for an additional four or five hundred attendees.
It wasn’t always that way for Crossroads, however, which now
features a café, two youth wings, a gymnasium, and state-of-theart
sound mixing equipment at its main campus in Oakdale.
Twenty-one years ago, the church consisted of a core group of
10 to 12 launch-team members meeting in the Heritage Room at
the Tonidale, where a small praise band donating their time and
equipment set up and tore down each Sunday. Crossroads
founder Steve Cordle, then a 33-year-old with a master’s in
divinity and bachelor’s in music, drove to the hotel each week
with the only four people he could be sure would attend: his wife,
Linda, and three boys, Josh, Jonathan, and Daniel.
“Every Sunday morning we used to drive to the Tonidale and
wonder if people would show up,” says Steve, who at the time
was earning his doctorate in ministry from the United Theological
Seminary.
Previously, he’d served at churches in Somerset and Fayette
counties from 1983 until 1991, when he gained approval from the
United Methodist Church to open a new church in the airport
area. It was a decision that came with no small amount of
excitement or trepidation, and, he says, was preempted by a good
year and a half of soul searching. After assembling a small
contingency of about a dozen congregation members, Steve says
TOP: In the early 1990s, the small congregation met at The
Tonidale ballroom; BOTTOM: Pastor Cordle, left, with church
members during the land purchase and dedication.
the church reached out to the community
by cold calling 5,000 households.
“We’d call and ask them if they already
went to a church, and if they said they did
then we’d thank them and hang up,” says
Steve. “If not, we told them that we were
starting a church and asked if they were
interested in finding out more about us.”
Eventually, their membership grew to
about 80 and they were holding small
group sessions in each other’s homes; a
tenet that the church still operates on
today.
“Now matter how large the church gets,
others in those groups will still know your
family and even your dog’s name,” says
Steve, who’s written one book and
contributed to another on what’s often
referred to as cell group congregations.
In 1995, the church built its first, 300-
person sanctuary completely with
volunteer help. They didn’t even have a
construction loan.
“Middle school girls even helped,” says
Steve about the original sanctuary, which
is now used largely as a chapel for
weddings and a couple of youth services each Sunday.
In 2005, the church began expanding to additional campuses,
first when interest surfaced in Bridgeville, and then when
Crossroads was contacted by two failing churches in Cranberry
and East Liberty. Recently, the church went international when a
French, father-son team sought Steve out through his Joel
Comiskey Group blog, asking him to coach them to become
ministers. In high school, Steve had studied in Brussels. Despite
the secular culture, the two have since opened branches in
Versailles and the south of France.
Going from church member to minister or full time employee
isn’t all that unusual at Crossroads, which caters with its small
groups to anyone from the recently initiated to the longtime
adherent. Such was the case with Dale Roddy, who began as a
church volunteer and now heads up the Bridgeville campus out
of a converted warehouse. Children’s director Ginny Melhorn
and treasurer Judy Hironimus have been around since the
beginning. So has Steve’s son Jonathan, who is now the
worship director at the East Liberty location, and Al Gyergyo,
who coaches small groups.
Crossroads’ very first service in its new sanctuary took place a
couple of months ago on September 29. It was the anniversary of
the very first service the church ever held at the Tonidale in
1991.
“We didn’t plan it that way,” says Steve. “It just happened.”