One of 2021’s Best Novels Revolves Around … a Church Youth Group?

In “Crossroads,” Jonathan Franzen portrays the life of faith with uncanny precision and sympathy.

The rumors are true. The panoramic new novel from Jonathan Franzen is about, among many other things, a church youth group. Crossroads, the name of both the book and the group, may even be the finest work of fiction ever written on the subject. Which is not meant as faint praise so much as an acknowledgement of the peculiarity of a work like this coming into existence in the first place, much less in 2021.

Crossroads is not the sort of youth group that most contemporary readers will associate with the term, however. There are no Bible studies, no prayer circles, no games of capture the flag, no tracts. Instead, the group bears a distinctly mainline Protestant character, albeit in its early-1970s incarnation, the period in which the novel is set.

The language of the group (a ministry of the fictional First Reformed Church in New Prospect, Illinois) is more psychological than spiritual, its character more in line with the confrontational self-help ethos of the support groups that were gaining traction at the time than the “Big E” evangelicalism that was emerging alongside. Crossroads paints a picture of a bygone era, one when cigarettes outnumbered guitars in the church parking lot by a factor of ten.

Groups like Crossroads may be relics at this point, but they are not an invention. I witnessed a similar group explode out of a Congregational church in Connecticut during the late 1990s. Franzen chronicled his own involvement in a nearly identical outfit in his essay collection The Discomfort Zone.

Interlocking crises

We first encounter the group at the zenith of its near-cultlike popularity during Advent in 1971. Charismatic leader Rick Ambrose has managed to convene an impressive throng of misfits and “popular …

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Venture Capitalists See Profit in Prayer

Religion apps attract more than $175 million in investment.

Tech investors have discovered religion—or at least religion apps.

In 2021, venture capitalists poured more than $175 million into a handful of software companies developing spirituality tools for smartphones, betting big that tech startups can find a way to make a profit off of prayer, daily devotion, Scripture meditation, and Bible reading.

Prayer and spirituality apps aren’t new. They’ve existed almost as long as smartphones. But they didn’t attract this much capital until recently.

Ten years ago, the amount of venture funding invested in religion apps was negligible, coming in at less than $100,000. By 2016, that number had climbed to $6 million, and by 2019, tech investors put about $1.30 out of every $10,000 they invested in startups into religious apps.

Last year, as tech startup funding grew to a record $600 billion, investors put nearly $3 out of every $10,000 toward religious apps.

The two big winners are Hallow and Glorify. Hallow, a Catholic app that has partnered with 250 parishes across the country but especially targets people who’ve stopped going to church, received more than $50 million. Glorify, an app that promises to help users develop a daily worship habit, raised $40 million in investments.

“It’s just a ridiculously exciting time,” Ed Beccle, one of the cofounders of the London-based Glorify, told Religion News Service. “I feel like I am constantly pinching myself.”

Part of the rush of funding may be due to COVID-19. The pandemic drew attention to how much regular religious practice could be moved online. But investors clearly believe religion apps will continue to be popular long after the pandemic passes into memory.

The apps seem to be considered …

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‘Give Us a King’: Lessons from the Capitol Sedition

Samuel’s message to Israel about unchecked power stands true today. We should listen.

When the prophet Samuel grew old, he made his sons the leaders of Israel in his stead. But his sons were corrupt, and the people were soon discontent with their unjust rule. “Give us a king to lead us,” the elders said. Samuel was offended, but he took the request before God.

“It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king,” God replied, giving Samuel a solemn warning to pass along to the people before the deal was done: The king will conscript your sons to his armies and your daughters to his household. He’ll tax away the best of your harvests and lavish the fruits of your work on his friends. He’ll take whatever he wants from you and require your fealty, and when you “cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day,” because such abusive authority is a result of a fallen, human king (1 Sam. 8:1–22).

The contrast in God’s admonition isn’t between kingship and some other form of human government. Rather, it’s between a king who rules as he pleases in his own right, and a prophet-judge who acts under delegated temporary, limited authority from God. But God’s warning to Israel about concentrated, unchecked power holds true today, and it’s a characterization that keeps coming to my mind as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Capitol sedition on January 6, 2021.

Politics is most basically about power, of course: who holds it and what they do with it. But the way Americans have talked about power over the past year is unusual for our country in living memory. We were trending this way already, yet January 6 feels to me like a tipping point.

The Atlantic’s January …

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On Ukraine-Russia Border, Evangelicals Endure as Invasion Looms

(UPDATED) Baptists and Pentecostals in both nations assess activism, unity, and reregistration in the Donbas region’s occupied Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine celebrates Christmas twice, honoring both the Eastern and Western church calendars. Yet this season, Pentecostals spent the week leading up to December 25 in prayer and fasting while Baptists did the same from Christmas Day to New Year’s Day.

The reason: tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed on the border, threatening a full invasion.

“Prayer is our spiritual weapon,” said Igor Bandura, vice president of the Baptist Union of Ukraine, of the group petitions to the Prince of Peace. “God can undo what the politicians are planning.”

Russian-backed separatists have held control of the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine since 2014. This past November, the European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) declared Donbas “the area of Europe where the church suffers the most.” In total the conflict has killed over 14,000 people and displaced 2 million of the region’s 5 million people.

This past Friday, US President Joe Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that any further invasion of Ukraine would result in “a heavy price to pay”; Putin replied that any new sanctions would trigger a complete breakdown in relations. On Monday, Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the US and its allies would “respond decisively” to Russian aggression; Zelensky signaled appreciation for the “unwavering support.”

Trying to help years ago from the Russian side, Vitaly Vlasenko was labeled a spy.

Traveling 650 miles south from Moscow to Luhansk, Ukraine, at his own expense, the now–general secretary of the Russian Evangelical Alliance (REA) waded into a war zone.

By 2018, separtist leaders in Donbas had crafted laws to re-register churches, …

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Parents Set the Pace for Their Adult Children’s Religious Life

“Handing Down the Faith” shows a vast majority of Americans don’t choose their religious beliefs. They inherit them.

Why are parents the most important figures shaping the religious lives and futures of their children in the United States? The primary and powerful role of parents in religious socialization may seem obvious to readers today. But that is because we are familiar with our current system, not because it is historically normal or inevitable.

Some older readers may remember times and religious subcultures that worked differently. People from other eras and places in history and the world could also tell about different means of religious transmission across generations.

Parents define for their children the role that religious faith and practice ought to play in life, whether important or not, which most children roughly adopt. Parents set a “glass ceiling” of religious commitment above which their children rarely rise. Parental religious investment and involvement is in almost all cases the necessary and even sometimes sufficient condition for children’s religious investment and involvement.

This parental primacy in religious transmission is significant because, even though most parents do realize it when they think about it, their crucial role often runs in the background of their busy lives; it is not a conscious, daily, strategic matter. Furthermore, many children do not recognize the power that their parents have in shaping their religious lives but instead view themselves as autonomous information processors making independent, self-directing decisions. Widespread cultural scripts also consistently say that the influence of parents over their children recedes starting with the onset of puberty, while the influence of peers, music, and social media takes over.

Other common and influential …

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Conservation Group Tries One More Thing to Preserve an African Woodland: Prayer

A Rocha Kenya cites WhatsApp intercession group as key to saving habitat for owls, shrews, and other endangered creatures.

The Dakatcha Woodland is home to Africa’s tiniest owl; a long-legged shrew with golden fur found nowhere else on earth; and weaver birds so rare it took Kenyan ornithologist Colin Jackson 13 years to track down their breeding grounds.

The East African habitat, which stretch over about 465,000 acres north of the coastal town of Malindi, Kenya, are under constant threat from climate change, expanding farms, and charcoal production.

“We’re fighting against a huge wave of destruction,” Jackson, who is also head of A Rocha Kenya, told CT.

There are only so many things you can do to save a forest. You can lobby for environmental laws. Buy land and place it in a trust. Raise money. Raise awareness. Promote scientific research on the importance of the habitat for biodiversity.

And, according to Jackson, you can pray.

“There have been times when things have looked pretty desperate and yet we’ve managed to break through and things have improved,” he said.

A Rocha Kenya, the local branch of the international network of environmental organizations with Christian ethos, has set up a “wall of prayer” to protect the Dakatcha Woodland and other key sites. It consists of a WhatsApp group of about 80 or so Christian conservationists around the world that A Rocha Kenya can call on for intercession when faced with a crisis.

Many people are skeptical of the power of prayer, and there is an especially fierce criticism of those who invoke “thoughts and prayers” as a way not to take action on pressing social issues. But Christians who care about the environment have been increasingly turning to intercession as a spiritual tool commensurate with great need.

Believers from Asia, Europe, and …

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Illinois Eliminated Parole in 1978. These Christians Want to Bring it Back.

A belief that people can change bolsters their movement.

Howard Keller would like to get out of Joliet Prison someday.

If he did get out, he’d like to go back to Chicago and buy a pair of hair clippers. Then he’d open his own barber shop. He’d like to tell folks what he’s learned about alcohol abuse and addiction. And if he only got the chance, he’d like to say he’s sorry and ask for the opportunity to start again.

“I did something wrong,” Keller would say, “and I’ve made all the efforts I can to change my life. Can you give me a second chance?”

But it’s unlikely any of that will happen. Keller is 43 years old. He has another 34 years on his 55-year prison sentence. And according to the state of Illinois, it doesn’t matter how much Keller has changed since he shot and killed a man in a doorway outside a liquor store in 2000.

It doesn’t matter that he got his barber’s license, tutors people preparing to take the GED, and is working on a seminary degree. It doesn’t matter that he’s been rehabilitated and longs for restoration in his community.

There is no possibility of parole.

In 1978—the year Keller was born—Illinois became the second state in the nation to abolish its parole system. The reasons why Illinois and eventually a total of 16 states eliminated the possibility of conditional early release are complicated. Some argued that fixed sentences are more of a deterrent on crime. Emerging research in the late 1970s also seemed to indicate the differences between those who did and who didn’t get parole were arbitrary or, worse, discriminatory, and the system did not seem to have any good tools for evaluating an individual’s rehabilitation.

Abolishing parole, many …

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In 2022, Let’s Take T.S. Eliot’s Advice

The poet said Christian institutions and community needed refreshing. They still do.

This is a season for taking stock of who we are, how we live, and what we are building. It is the best season, perhaps, to ask ourselves the question of poet T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock: “Have you built well?”

In 1934, Eliot penned The Rock to fundraise for 45 church buildings near London. Appropriately, his frequent theme was building—not only churches but also the church as a thick community, an institution, a people seeking knowledge of God, a sanctuary from alienation and futility.

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building?

When we think of the church community and institutions the church has founded, our workmanship is mixed at best. In society at large, distraction, alienation, and futility seem to have only escalated since Eliot’s day, while the church in the West shows many signs of decay. Religious disaffiliation is rising rapidly, and even we who remain in the faith often can’t escape the inattentive, disintegrating tendencies of modern life.

We too live amid the breakdown of the local relationships, businesses, and civil society analyzed by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America and eulogized by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. With us, as Eliot saw in his society, a sense of community can be too weak, with people “settled nowhere,”

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance.

In this state of communal disrepair, Eliot advised, “The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.” His words echo James 2’s contention that faith without works is dead (v. 26), that it’s …

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Kids Bible Stories Get the Kickstarter Treatment

The bespoke ‘Book of Belonging’ aims to highlight more women from Scripture and spur imaginations with unique illustrations.

At the center of publishing trends toward more aesthetically beautiful Bibles and more theologically rich children’s books lies The Book of Belonging.

A Kickstarter venture by writer Mariko Clark and illustrator Rachel Eleanor, the project was inspired by Clark’s six-year-old daughter, who noticed the lack of female characters featured in her children’s Bible and asked, “Does God love boys more than girls?”

Among the best-selling children’s story Bibles on Amazon, 7 percent of the stories featured a female main character, 19 percent mentioned a woman, and only 23 percent depicted a woman in the illustrations, according to Clark’s analysis.

I know I’m not the only parent resolving these issues with homemade curriculum, Mariko Clark thought to herself. What if I just created the book I’m already creating?

The Book of Belonging, scheduled to release in 2023, is a story Bible for “modern and mindful kids.” It will feature imaginative retellings of 30 scriptural accounts—selected to feature more women than typical children’s Bibles—and unique, whimsical illustrations designed to depict a fuller cast of characters from biblical history.

“I think how the images I make will affect people’s beliefs and values,” said Eleanor, who drew the scenes in teal, gold, and orange hues. “Gaps in our perspective later grow into conscious and unconscious beliefs. … We might say we believe everyone is included, but do we show it?”

Scripture includes males and females from the beginning (Gen. 1:27), and Christians celebrate female figures like Deborah, Miriam, Esther, Mary, and Dorcas—in addition to the women involved in the …

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12 Leaders Evangelicals Lost in 2021

Remembering theologian C. René Padilla, evangelist Luis Palau, refugee advocate Evelyn Mangham, and others.

In a year of too much death and dying, we lost some notable Christian leaders. Some were pastors, some evangelists, and some musicians. They were not all saints. They were not uncomplicated. But in their lives we were reminded of the hope that is within us, the kingdom that is coming, and the mystery that though we shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed (1 Cor. 15:51).

As Thomas McKenzie, the 50-year-old Anglican pastor who died on the first day of his sabbatical, explained at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is part of what it means to be Christian.

“We are weak in many ways, but we have the love of God in Christ and a deep commitment to one another,” he said. “We have a great future, a future of both suffering and triumph, of Cross and Resurrection.”

Here are the obituaries of a dozen men and women whom evangelicals lost in 2021, arranged in alphabetical order:

Check out the rest of our 2021 year-end lists here.

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