Wired USA - 03.2020

Crossroads,

the congregation

that helped

usher Reynolds

toward his conversation with God, has in recent years become a

major emblem of the fusion in sensibilities between tech and evan-

gelical Christianity. Today it is a 52,000-member megachurch,

with 13 campuses, a presence in six prisons, a streaming app called

Crossroads Anywhere, and ambitions to expand nationally. Its

lead pastor, Brian Tome, likes to say that Crossroads is “more like

a startup than a church.” In 2017 it was named the fastest-growing

congregation in the country, and also the nation’s fourth largest.

The story of Crossroads’ rise runs pretty neatly in tandem with

that of Cincinnati, which 20 years ago was an urban cautionary tale.

Although the city is home to the headquarters of eight Fortune 500

companies, including Procter & Gamble, Macy’s, and Kroger, by the

1990s it had also become synonymous with stereotypes of urban

blight. Decades of white flight left central city neighborhoods like

Over-the-Rhine—named for the long-departed Ger-

mans who first settled there—roughly 75 percent black

and overwhelmingly poor. Businesses were boarded up,

and crime reached the point that one author compared

Over-the-Rhine to The Wire’s fictional Hamsterdam,

a designated area where police agreed not to interfere

with nonviolent lawbreakers. A late-’90s attempt at

gentrification and renewal that rebranded the neigh-

borhood as the Digital Rhine fizzled with the dotcom

bust, and after a 2001 police shooting of an unarmed

black teenager sparked days of civil unrest, one conser-

vative magazine declared the neighborhood “ground

zero in inner-city decline.” Landlords abandoned the

downtown’s Italianate housing stock, fleeing one of the

largest historic districts in the country.

Crossroads was founded in the mid-’90s by a group

of Cincinnati executives, including several from

Procter& Gamble. They conducted surveys and mar-

ket research and decided to build a church that would

appeal to non-churchgoers, young business profes-

sionals, and men, who would then bring their families

along. They hired Tome—a tan, boisterous minister

who rides motorcycles and would go on to tape a

regular video message called “Brian Brings a Beer”—

as their lead pastor. The church hosted events like

adventure “man camps” and an annual “Super Bowl

In 2017,
Crossroads
was named
the fastest-
growing
church in
America.