Cross of Grace Church

Gospel renewal in the city, and through the city.

— · Sundays at 9:00 & 11:00 AM

About the Church

Cross of Grace Church is a gospel-centered congregation in the heart of historic El Paso, Texas — where the United States meets Mexico and two countries share daily life. The church's heartbeat is gospel renewal in the city, and through the city, in the world. The conviction underneath the work is straightforward: Jesus has changed our lives for the better, and we believe he can change anyone's life.

Sundays at Cross of Grace are unembarrassedly centered on the gospel. Two services — 9:00 and 11:00 — gather the congregation around the good news of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection in every element: singing, testimony, preaching. The music blends classic hymns and newer songs, following Colossians 3:16's pattern of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Kids have their own program through fifth grade, and a soft room with a live video feed serves moms of infants and toddlers.

The distinctive posture is outward. Cross of Grace exists for El Paso. Home groups gather across the city during the week. Mission and outreach are not a separate program — they're built into the church's pattern of life. The leadership is a multi-pastor team: Lead Pastor Ricky Alcantar serves alongside pastors Todd Peterson, Chuck Mosely, Joe Alcantar Jr., and Jonathan Vogan, with younger leaders in formation behind them.

Full confession of faith, leadership team, visitor information, and ways to get involved are at crossofgrace.net.

About the Preacher

Ricky Alcantar serves as the Lead Pastor at Cross of Grace Church in El Paso. He shepherds a multicultural congregation gathered on the US-Mexico border, and his preaching is built for the people he serves and the city he loves.

The Gospel That Names the Pressure Before It Speaks

Every Ricky sermon has a recognizable shape. He names the cultural moment first — directly, by data and by example. A viral monologue. A piece of demographic research. An interview on NPR. A Disney scene. A news cycle. The diagnosis is detailed and unflinching. Then, explicitly, the pivot: "And here's the good news from this text." The phrase shows up once or twice per sermon, every time, marking the exact moment the air in the room changes. The world's pressure gets named in full — and then the gospel speaks back, not as if the diagnosis weren't real, but as the one true answer to a real problem.

A Church for a Specific City

What anchors Ricky's preaching theologically is ecclesiology — the doctrine of the church. Across the corpus, his most-developed theological theme is what it means to be the church together: gathered in Christ, sent on mission, accountable to one another, learning to bear each other's weight. The sermons are not about a generic Christian life. They are about this church living this faith in this city.

And the city is El Paso. The border is not a special topic in Ricky's preaching — it's the air the church breathes. Bilingual jokes, Hispanic-household references, the awareness that the congregation includes mixed marriages and English-only families and lifelong El Pasoans and recent arrivals — none of this is performed. It's just present. Cross of Grace exists for El Paso, and Ricky preaches that way.

Friends, Brothers, and Sisters

Where other expositors reach for "you" singular, Ricky reaches for friends, brothers and sisters, moms, young men, church family. The vocative is constant. He treats the room as people he knows and loves — and he treats himself the same way. He is rarely the hero of his own illustrations. He's the man who forgot his glasses, the dad doing school drop-off, the pastor who sometimes hears from members in counseling, "Do you have anything else? Beyond the Bible?" The preaching never positions the speaker above the listener. It positions him alongside them, including in his own ordinary mornings.

Pop Culture Plus the Apostles

Ricky reads broadly, and he preaches that way. His most-quoted sources span the Apostle Paul, Charles Spurgeon, Wayne Grudem, Kent Hughes, John Piper, D.A. Carson, John Calvin, G.K. Beale, Sinclair Ferguson, Tim Keller, G.K. Chesterton — and Johnny Cash. (Yes — six citations across the corpus, and they earn their keep.) On any given Sunday a sermon might pull from Jeopardy, a Disney movie, a viral monologue, an NPR interview, or the Declaration of Independence — but always serving doctrine, never decorating it. A pop-culture reference in Ricky's preaching is earning the next sentence about Christ.

Application That Lands on Tuesday Morning

Ricky applies the text relentlessly — five or six times per sermon, on average, which is meaningfully above the working baseline for expository preachers. More importantly, the applications are concrete. Not "trust God in suffering," but the specific decision in the school-prep routine. Not "pursue holiness," but the moment in the counseling office where a young man fails at the thing he was sure he had under control. He is preaching to actual people in actual lives, and the applications never quite let the listener escape into abstraction.

Doctrine That Feels Like Being Loved

Ricky's rhetorical register is mind-engaged but with notable emotional warmth — more pathos per sermon than most of his expository peers. When something is hard, he names that it's hard. When obedience costs, he names that it costs. The result is preaching that earns trust before it asks for change — and then asks for change, because the gospel does ask. The doctrine doesn't only argue. It acknowledges — and that acknowledgment is part of what makes the gospel pivot land.

In short: a pastor for the people he actually pastors. Cultural diagnostician, gospel announcer, expository builder, son of the border, friend of the room.

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