Welcome to the website of the New Church Development (NCD) Team. We are the church planting arm of the Presbytery of the Cascades, a group of 122 Presbyterian congregations from Oregon and parts of Washington and California. Our goal is to catalyze the planting of missional churches all across the Northwest.

Your NCD Team seeks to grow the Church of Jesus Christ one church at a time – beginning right here in the Presbytery of the Cascades. Our immediate goal is to inspire 15 congregations from our Presbytery to join this church planting movement by Pentecost Sunday 2008 through becoming either a Parent Church, Partner Church, or Sponsor Church.


NCD at the National Level - Members of the Cascades NCD Team (Craig Williams, Scott Peterson and Don Frank) attended the National NCD Conference in May 2008. Check out the video and the website of what the General Assembly is doing in New Church Development.

Missional Leaders Luncheon - Thank you to the 40-50 of you who attended the Missional Leaders' Luncheon on March 8, 2008 at the Presbytery meeting. It is the first of what we hope will be gatherings at every Presbytery meeting. To continue the discussion in an ongoing way, please click here to go to our Discussion Forums. Anyone can view the forums, but to make posts to the forum, you need to create a username and login to use the forums, which you can do by clicking here and filling in the form. Then after that you can login each time to make posts. If you're having trouble creating an account in, please email us.


Hiring of Director of New Church Development (NCD) - The Rev. Craig Williams of Los Ranchos Presbytery in California has been hired as the New Church Development Director, a program staff position in the Presbytery of the Cascades, announced The Rev. Dwayne Brown, Chair of the Search Team.

Williams comes to Cascades with a long history in new church development both as an organizing pastor in Trabuco, California and in service with the denomination at the General Assembly level. His completed doctoral work at Columbia Seminary is in New Church Development. He is the Moderator of Los Ranchos Presbytery. People who know him describe him as uniquely gifted and very creative. He thinks outside of the box. He is "one of the best NCD people in the denomination."

He began work on April 15th in the Portland office of the presbytery.

Please join the team in welcoming him to Cascades Presbytery!