Canter Bridge

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If author Craig Groeschel’s dustcover picture makes him too young too have written such an urgent book, the football-field exhortations and postmodern layout of the book seem to line up perfectly with his youthful pose. I must confess that Groeschel had overcome my reservations about his style by about the fifty-yard line … I mean, the halfway point of this highly-focused book.

Focus, in fact, might be a good word for what Groeschel has given us, even if he prefers the Hebraic-sounding chazown, a word occasionally used in the Hebrew Bible for a prophet’s body of work. That is, he wants us to see that a passive life is not aimed at anything in particular and therefore destined not to hit it. It is vision—the author takes some hermeneutical license with the concept—implemented by courageous decisions and backed up by the accountability that is inherent in a shared life that makes all the difference in the world. Or that will, if only Rev. Groeschel’s readers will follow his lead as so many of his parishioners seem to have done.

This is one of those books that packages counsel that is actually quite ancient in a hortatory style that is at times achingly contemporary. It rings with the urgency of a prophet who realizes that he is losing his own generation except for the few, and wishes for a more widespread redemption than he has glimpsed heretofore.

The book is organized to promote introspection and the writing down of fresh clarity and resolve, connected for those who need it with resources on the author’s Chazown website.

A young colleague introduced me to this book. I intend to use it in a mentoring process with him and also with my oldest son. We can all use a little more vision in the deadening fog that is American pop culture. If you’d like a bit more yourself and you resonate with his language, Groeschel may be your man.