1 star
Theologically wrong. Did not finish. Cannot recommend. Will not read or suggest to anyone. Received a complimentary copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher.

For the Nonfiction Reader Challenge category of a book published in 2024, I sampled a number of forthcoming releases, but for some reason this was the only one that caught my attention and made me want to read further. It’s a fairly up-to-the-minute story, too; it won’t be published till August, and the main action covers the last few years, up to Easter of 2023. The pandemic thus plays a key role, though one unexpected by the author when she started the project in 2019.

The subject is a Philadelphia church called Circle of Hope, which up to that point had been a remarkable growth story, at its height comprising over 700 members spread among four congregations. The founder, a “Jesus freak” from the 60s, was heading toward retirement, facing the challenge of handing his creation over to the next generation. The church had become an important source of local services and community building;. While aiming to uphold the values of the early Christians, to share resources and empower the disenfranchised, through enterprises including two successful thrift stores, it had quietly amassed $1 million in assets. An offshoot of the Anabaptist movement that emphasized the priesthood of all believers, it eschewed old traditions in favor of creative engagement with the way of following Jesus, with “love” as the watchword.

Sounds great, but there was trouble ahead. As the church was grappling with “Founder’s Syndrome” (as many organizations do when transitioning away from the influence of a strong leader), the pandemic hit with its burden of anxiety, raising controversy about how to keep people safe while still remaining a community. A legacy of racism was unearthed, and longtime resistance to affirming LGBTQ individuals surfaced as well. In an enclave of well-meaning, idealistic, liberal people, some uncomfortable truths had to be faced, including the fact that the percentage of BIPOC church members was significantly lower than in the city as a whole. As educated white people joined the church and moved into low-rent neighborhoods, they were driving out the former residents, and though they might think what they were doing was opposing capitalism, in fact they were enabling gentrification.

Griswold, the daughter of an Episcopal presiding bishop who found his own denomination deeply riven over LGBTQ affirmation, seems to have been drawn to the church out of interest in its liberal values, but found herself chronicling its demise. Over the course of just a few years, which the pandemic and general societal trends made a hard time for most denominations, it was hemorrhaging members at four times the rate of the church in general. From a “circle of hope,” its seemed to have fallen into a death spiral of dissent and internal conflict.

This is an extremely complex story. Griswold has organized it in four parts, each in turn composed of chapters that focus in turn on each of the church’s four pastors (with one exception). That means we see the same events and the same ideas from different, sometimes diametrically opposing points of view. I’m not always convinced this was the best choice. There’s a lot of backtracking and jumping around in time and place, sometimes making for a confusing narrative, sometimes there’s unnecessary repetition. I wished a timeline had been included, as sometimes it was hard to keep track of where we were in the story.

Sometimes there really were holes in the narrative. At some points events were briefly referred to, then more fully explained later — not seeming like an intentional artistic choice, but rather sloppy editing. (There’s a chance those holes will be fixed in the final version, but by this stage I would expect better continuity.) There also were people, events, and relationships that seemed important, but were given hardly any attention — like the wife of one of the pastors, whom we barely glimpsed at all. I wondered what else might have been left out, while our attention was being deflected to certain narrative threads. Would it have been better to focus on two of the pastors, with the others playing more of a supporting role, to make at least their portions feel more complete? In addition, I really would have liked to hear more from the congregation members who are the real “Circle,” but they remain mainly in the background.

What is developed clearly is a personality conflict that centers around the one BIPOC pastor. As he calls out racist tendencies in the church, his white colleagues appear to sincerely want to hear him and other members of the congregation, and to initiate change. But that proves to be impossible, in the way it’s carried out. An anti-racist consultant is hired, but soon leaves, for vaguely stated reasons.

In fact, it’s not at all clear what the anti-racist campaigners want the white members to do. The latter agree to be led into a transformative process, seeming sincere in their wish to repent and reform, but then they are scolded for asking questions, for being sad, angry, or upset about what is happening in their church, and for leaving when they can’t take the tantrums and bullying any more. (The one white male pastor, who happens to be the founder’s son, is badgered until he quits, then excoriated for “hijacking the narrative.”) Absolutely anything white people do or say can be considered evidence either of white supremacy, or of white fragility, and no practical, actionable steps are given for them to work their way out of either condition.

Meanwhile, when some BIPOC members of the congregation say they don’t feel they have experienced racism and want clarification, they’re told that those who have experienced it don’t have to explain, as that would traumatize them further. Apparently, there is only one right way to see events, and any disagreement between BIPOC members is to be suppressed at all costs.

Griswold reports all of this in a dispassionate, objective way, without giving much sign of her opinion about it all. Readers can try to make up their own mind about what is going on. Indeed, although to me the behavior of the pastor and congregation member leading the campaign seemed not only ineffective but unethical, to some they are heroes. Exacerbated by pandemic stress and everything else conspiring to unhinge us these days, the whole situation seems to demonstrate how hard it is to come together and listen to each other, even for those with the best of intentions.

Partway through this depressing tale, I was tempted to stop reading, but I was glad that I continued. Only late in the story did I start to understand how this could be happening, how when people latch onto causes with such passion, fighting a foreign, amorphous enemy — such as “whiteness” — sometimes it’s really something closer to home that they are even more afraid to face. It’s not that the cause is not justified, but their fight can’t be effective when they are blinded by what they don’t want to see in themselves, or to face in those closest to them.

And sometimes whole institutions are built around such a blind spot, and however much good may be lost thereby, they have to fall apart and die in order to reveal that weakness. Rebuilding can take place then, on stronger foundations, but only when we have the courage to face and learn from what we have done.

The church was broken, but the people remain. They will reform, reconnect, and create something new. And it is in such a dying and reviving, not a closed circle of perfection but an open spiral of becoming, that Christ can actually work. The book had to stop somewhere, but that story, the real story, has no end.

Eliza Griswold spent several years with a pacifist church where the pastors were forced to navigate their way through organizational growing pains, Covid, and #BlackLivesMatter, among other events.

I wanted to like this book, but for me it was flat. The in-fighting and personality issues could as easily have happened at a company as at a church, except that corporations don't ask Jesus to intervene. The book was most interesting when the author pulled back from the specific ethnography to provide a broader context. More information about different churches, the changing face of religion in the United States, and the decline in religious participation would have helped to explain why this particular church and its foibles are important for us to know.

If I were to describe the church at the center of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold's "Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church," I would likely use a term popularized by folks like Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne - "red letter Christian."

Started by Rod White, Circle of Hope could easily have been seen as a cousin to The Simple Way, the intentional community co-founded by Shane Claiborne that burst to familiarity after the popularity of Claiborne's "The Irresistible Revolution" became a bestseller. Claiborne's was a, and still is to a degree, the kind of popularity to which Jonny, one of the Circle of Hope pastors chronicled by Griswold, would likely aspire.

It has been these kinds of churches that have drawn a broad tapestry of believers. These are people tired of church in the traditional way yet not quite ready to let it go. They want to do church differently. When White and his family founded Circle of Hope in hopes of creating just such a home, a different kind of church that would love all and include all. Words like emergent, new monastic, and others offer a way to understand these churches, but they have always tended to draw the "other Christians" - people wounded by the church or deconstructionists or people who simply believe there has to be a better way.

Truthfully, after reading"Circle of Hope" I'm starting to wonder if there is a better way.

It's well known and well documented that church attendance in America is down. Churches are dying or becoming a fraction of what they used to be.

Griswold's "Circle of Hope" immerses us within Philly's Circle of Hope, a church that began as one central body with a vision of being radically different and dedicated to living out the red letters. Pastor White was its pastor, though he enthusiastically fostered leadership growth that would eventually identify the individuals in "Circle of Hope." When White stepped down from leadership, not so much leaving the congregation as widening its leadership, it would fall upon the likes of Rachel, Jonny, Julie, and Ben (White's son) to lead the church. White had left the church at a time when four distinct congregations existed, though in theory they were guided by united pastors.

"Circle of Hope" immerses us into the the journey of this "radical outpost of Jesus followers" in Philly. They were dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, social justice, and toward having difficult conversations.

Circle of Hope is not the only such church in this relatively unknown yet influential movement that exists on the edge of what is known as evangelicalism. As a church, it grew for forty years and from one to four congregations.

Then, crisis would hit - generational differences, an increasingly politicized religious landscape, the COVID pandemic that prevented gathering in worship, and a rise in activism that demanded more than simply marching. Suddenly, this church which was founded as part of the peaceful Anabaptist movement struggled to know how to lean into its values.

If it feels like this is some jaded expose of contemporary Christianity, think again. Griswold immersed herself within the life of Circle of Hope with their permission. As she notes eloquently in her final words, a benediction of sorts, it was a permission that none could have realized would end up providing an up close and deeply personal view of everything we love about church and everything that makes us need to deconstruct the church experience.

It took almost unfathomable bravery and transparency, spirit-led really, for the White family to continue participating within this project even as it began to express itself differently. It took remarkable leadership for these four pastors plus others within Circle of Hope to vulnerably continue sharing life-shaking journeys. Remarkable.

"Circle of Hope" is immersive. It is explosive. It is intimate and tender and wise and respectful. Griswold's background as a journalist is evident throughout, neither offering an overly sympathetic account nor doing some sort of journalistic body slam of this church and these lives. Instead, this feels like truth over and over and over again.

Questions of power come up over and over and over again - gender based, race based, and so much more. Vital questions are asked and the answers aren't always pretty. How do we welcome the least of these? How do we commit to one another in a fractured world? Does power have a home in the church and can it genuinely be shared?

"Circle of Hope" is a revelation. You will feel immersed in the lives of these people and these pastors. If you're a Christian, you'll likely find yourself saying "I would never go to so-and-so's church" or "this pastor sounds amazing." Griswold doesn't decide for us if there are bad characters here - she simply shares the story and immerses us in its fullness. I found myself most drawn to Rachel as a pastor, though by the end of "Circle of Hope" everyone here is richly human, undeniably flawed, desperate to be loving, learning how to grow, struggling to disagree, and both part of the problem and part of its potential solution.

If you've ever been a pastor, and I have, "Circle of Hope" will ring as familiar and yet will tug at your heart, your mind, and your spirit.

"Circle of Hope" is a must-read for American churchgoers and anyone who has experienced what is described here as a "reckoning" with love, power, and justice while learning what it means to be the Church.