These are mentoring groups within specific professions where 12-16 people commit to meet together twice a year for three years to learn from older believers how to think Christianly about their professions.
Within each group we are privileged to have an older believer with a working lifetime of experience thinking through their profession from a biblical perspective. We call these friends our Inspirers because we are asking them to inspire the next generation of Christians within their professional field to learn to use their intellect to think through the impact of their Christian faith on their profession. Since 2012 we have run more than 20 different Professional Groups for young adults from Europe and the former Soviet Union.
This is a unique mentoring experience where you can benefit from a lifetime of biblical wisdom passed on to you. Explore the different groups we have been running and get in touch.
City Groups are mentoring groups for young Christian professionals, drawing together people from different occupations who live in the same area. The aim is to help them become more effective ambassadors for Christ in their workplaces, professions and societies by encouraging them to stand firm in their faith, develop mature Christian character, and grow in awareness of the opportunities to bring Christian influence. Each group makes a commitment to meet for 6 weekends over 2 or 3 years, and to support each other in peer mentoring conversations between these meetings. Find out more about the content of the Cross-Current program here.
Browse our list of current City Groups below. If you can't find one in your home town please contact us to see if we're planning to start one near you soon. If you'd like to set up a group yourself we're always looking for more local leaders and will provide you with all the training and support you need to start a new group.
If you came on this page you might be someone who practices prayer and wants to pray. Wonderful! There is something fundamentally wrong if we perceive our prayer time as a distraction from our daily business, duties, work; if we pray only to scream “SOS” to heaven! We come in prayer to understand God’s heart for people, and for this world, his calling, to see his loving care and to glorify him.
We really appreciate you praying with us for the next generation of young professionals. It is the main thing – and the best thing – we can do together in partnership with God. It is not just about trying to get something from God so we can do the work, it is about asking that his will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Our workplaces are a vast wasteland where the Gospel needs to become real. Christians in different professional fields are representatives of God’s kingdom in their work. This is the mission field where missionaries are not pastors or youth leaders, or any kind of cleric, but Christian professionals. Here are some ways you can pray:
First, please pray about your own faith and for the people you are working with, that they will see God in your life and will open their hearts to receive him and his love.
Second, remember in your prayers the emerging generation of young Christian professionals. On behalf of them, ask God that they will understand God’s calling in their work and will learn to live as signposts to Jesus, pointing those around them towards him, through the way they speak and the way they live at work.
Third, pray for multiplication in this ministry, both for the identification of future group leaders throughout Europe and Eurasia, and also the ability to serve other countries who want our help to prepare their young professionals for a life of serving Jesus at and through work.
Fourth, please pray for our practical needs: for safety when travelling, for safety of families back home, for the Lord to provide the funds and the advocacy we need to achieve the potential of this work. For more information about our financial needs, please visit DONATE.
Fifth, please have a look at our DIARY page to see what meetings are coming up. Pray for the Lord to use us to serve his people in order that his glory may be known and his kingdom come in the different places where our people live and work.
We will post prayer letters up on this website, but if you would like to be added to the list to receive prayer updates 3-4 times a year, please fill in the CONTACT form.
Thank you for your partnership in this work. Here is a quote from a recent email from one of our stuff in Eurasia: “In these years of prayers I was thinking a lot about graduates from our ministry. Most of them lost their faith in Christ after graduation as they moved to a new stage in their life because they couldn’t find support for their faith from a Christian community. Some of them became nominal Christians because of lack of support in church, some of them became agnostics or atheists because there is no strong intellectual group of believers who will discuss with them deep questions, some of them became Muslims because of the pressure in their workplace or persecution from their own family. Seeing all these needs of graduates, I feel a deep passion, urge and spiritual desire from God to serve graduates not only in my country but also in neighbouring countries where I have a lot of friends among Christian graduates, and they have the same struggles and issues as graduates in my country.”
Cross-Current is helping the next generation of Christian adults learn how to address the major issues of our time within their professional contexts from a Christian perspective.
We believe this work is vital to provide a robust Christian influence capable of speaking with clarity into the sectors that will shape future society.
We are currently working with around 500 young adults from 25 European and Eurasian countries, and have been invited to develop new work in 18 more countries outside Europe and Eurasia. Within 1 year we will be working with more than 1,500 young adults.
Because of the residential nature of the work, and the significant disparity in relative wealth from one part of the world to another, we often need to provide scholarships for participants. In addition we need to raise all the staff costs and operating expenses for our team.
This work is independently financed within IFES and we need your help.
Click here to donate through the IFES World website
