crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen

The urgent sense of purpose, the outsized emotions, the unavoidably hokey icebreakers, the all-important mission trip (and its attendant fundraisers), the ever-pressing hormones, the performative vulnerability, the oddly fierce power struggles. Many of the broad strokes will be recognizable to those who’ve logged serious youth ministry hours, either as a member or leader. This is the opposite of the reductio ad absurdum that characterizes most popular depictions of church life. And Franzen renders it so with uncanny precision and sympathy. Yet Ambrose is no charlatan what’s on offer on Sunday nights at First Reformed is, in modern parlance, authentic. This alienates the group’s founder, associate pastor Russ Hildebrandt, which (in classic pastor’s-kid fashion) only attracts Russ’s own progeny to join. Charismatic leader Rick Ambrose has managed to convene an impressive throng of misfits and “popular kids” alike. We first encounter the group at the zenith of its near-cultlike popularity during Advent in 1971. Franzen chronicled his own involvement in a nearly identical outfit in his essay collection The Discomfort Zone. I witnessed a similar group explode out of a Congregational church in Connecticut during the late 1990s. Groups like Crossroads may be relics at this point, but they are not an invention. Crossroads paints a picture of a bygone era, one when cigarettes outnumbered guitars in the church parking lot by a factor of ten. 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. Instead, the group bears a distinctly mainline Protestant character, albeit in its early-1970s incarnation, the period in which the novel is set. There are no Bible studies, no prayer circles, no games of capture the flag, no tracts.

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.Ĭrossroads is not the sort of youth group that most contemporary readers will associate with the term, however. Crossroads, the name of both the book and the group, may even be the finest work of fiction ever written on the subject. The panoramic new novel from Jonathan Franzen is about, among many other things, a church youth group.

Crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen