This book was so triggering to me I couldn't see it through. I got to a point where I felt actual despair at some of the relational dynamics. Maybe the pandemic left a bigger mark on me than I thought, maybe I have some hidden church trauma, or maybe being able to understand both sides on the racial spectrum just makes it very difficult to read about real people being completely broken and unable to find nuance and ending up hurting each other so badly and losing relationship completely.

I actually do want to know what happened and how they sorted out their differences but reading it was too raw and painful for me to continue.

This fact might actually might be the reason why some people should read this. I don't think it's a bad book at all -- probably a very effective journalistic work... so impactful that it was too heavy for me.

I loved Eliza Griswold's previous work, Amity and Prosperity, so I jumped at the chance to read her new book, Circle of Hope. In this work of journalistic nonfiction, she studies one small church (with four congregations) in Philadelphia and its attempts to create a community of radical Jesus lovers. Griswold looks at the power struggles, in-fighting, and attempts to deal with racism/sexism/homophobia through the lens of one church -- but this mirrors some of what is happening in churches across the nation. I found it fascinating and compelling. Highly recommend!

This is the journey of a progressive evangelical church that fell into turmoil and eventual decline. The church was founded by Gwen and Rod White in 1966. Called The Circle of Hope, it grew into four congregations in greater Philadelphia in 2019. Like countless other organizations, the church suffered a crisis of identity during the pandemic of 2020. As each pastor attempted to lead, their shared mission and collaboration began to fray, leaving the church at a precipice: the tension among personal devotion, social activism, and institutional loyalty.

The author titles each chapter with the name of one of the pastors she profiles, presenting a variety of perspectives in each section, jumping back and forth among people and events along a close timeline.

While on the tedious and confusing side I did like glimmers of a hopeful, alternative faith.
It did take me a long while to finish this book.

Sometimes a piece of reporting proves incredibly compelling, and all because a person is in the right place at the right time to chronicle it all. Such is the case with Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church.

The author had made the decision to profile a Philadelphia and greater environs area multisite but singular entity church associated with the Anabaptist tradition called Circle of Hope. It had been the brainchild of Rod and Gwen White who both inculcated the Evangelical Jesus People vibes along with the Church Growth Movement. They prided themselves on being a church that wasn’t your “normal” church, and considered itself quite progressive (for Evangelicalism in the late 20th century).

It was beyond time for the Whites to hand over leadership to the next generation, and the author had been invited in to be present in the meetings of the four new lead pastors and she would also interview them continually…beginning in 2019.

And then 2020 happened. The pandemic. George Floyd and greater sensitivity about the heritage of white supremacy in church spaces. Beyond these things also involved LGBTQIA+ matters of affirmation and inclusion.

What the author ends up chronicling is a lot of unwinding regarding all of these matters. Trying to extricate the church from the cult of personality around its founder, and the founders’ inability to truly step aside and to not respond poorly, led to all sorts of difficulties. They seemed entirely blind to their privilege and how their church’s culture tended to welcome and keep certain people but likewise proved alienating to others. The pastoral leadership is entirely on board with considering how well their church had addressed matters of race, but few were willing to really grapple with the truth of the matter. And yet there also seemed to be an exasperation which can be noted among many of those agitating for the work of antiracism in ways which ultimately proved counterproductive. It also doesn’t help when some of the new pastors want to make it all about them, whether they realize that’s what they are doing or not.

The matter of LGBTQIA+ affirmation caused a significant rift with the church’s denominational partner, which ultimately led to the church losing most of its property but holding onto a couple of its lucrative thrift store type businesses.

But it all seemed to prove too much for the pastors and the unity of Circle of Hope. By the end of the book, they are leading other groups or have moved onto other forms of employment. There are still people who had been part of Circle of Hope and who still meet together and share their faith in the four original areas, but Circle of Hope as a church and organization is no more.

In this book you will find whatever grist you want for your culture war mill. If you want to talk about how antiracism and LGBTQIA+ affirmation can tear a church apart, there’s material for that in this book. If you want to talk about resistance to concerns about antiracism and affirmation prove problematic, there’s material for that in this book. This book is not going to persuade anyone to change their minds about these matters.

But what the book does exceptionally well is attest to how you keep people according to what you are selling, and it’s very hard to steer a ship like that toward a different course. It expresses the ultimate limitations of the “church growth movement”: that which will work to make a church grow will not necessarily work well to allow for its development and maturity, and when you’re “marketing” a “product” to a given “audience,” and you get an “audience” and the numbers, and think yourself important, you’re often setting yourself up for a fall. Likewise regarding the cult of personality: when the attraction in a church is the preacher/pastor/founder/visionary/whomever, it’s going to be hard to move away from that person and keep people. It’s also a warning about aspirations to be “hip”: Circle of Hope might have been the “progressive” or “hip” type of community in the late twentieth century, but by the same standard seemed pretty backward by the end of the 2010s. For better or worse, we are all strongly tempted to hold to our “line” based on what we felt was right or comfortable at a given point in our lives. The past few years have been revealing about what that particular “line” has been for different people as various aspects of our culture have changed.

The author, and the pastors, should be commended for their openness and ability to express what happened in such a real and raw way. There’s a lot we can gain from it. But above all we should come to understand why Paul again and again emphasized the importance of bearing with one another, proving patient and long-suffering, and forgiving one another: when you do not, the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace cannot be sustained. Situations will expose and reveal you for who you are and what you are really about. And any kind of major change, let alone a whole suite of them, must be managed with the utmost care and especially patience. When people get exasperated, it all blows up.

It was a very interesting book about this church which was based on christianity. The author A wonderful job explaining how these people react to this church in each chapter.. The church started out small and then it became a very big church over time. The book addresses the issues about blackness and gay Is the church. Everybody had some kind of problem Needed to solve. The title was great and explain how the
Church started out and how it ended terrible.
Urban

Everyone in this book is a different kind of insufferable, so it's not the most enjoyable read. That could be forgiven if the content were more intriguing, but Circle of Hope (as the pastors come to realize by the end) is just a very typical church: a place where egos clash, power often usurps faith, and the people in the parish are there for reasons ranging from tragic to utterly narcissistic. I didn't find anything about Griswold's presentation particularly illuminating or refreshing or unique, and that's because Circle of Hope is none of these things.

Griswold tries to make the people and story interesting by playing with the structure, but it just makes things feel repetitive. In the middle, for example, we see the same sequence of events and conversations happen at different times from different perspectives. It's jarring to realize, once the event comes back up, that we're stuck in a kind of loop, reliving these (exhausting, overly serious, self-serving) conversations about race over and over for several chapters. (Unsurprisingly, this is also where the protagonists' ugliness begins to really surface, turning even the most well-meaning people here into absolute nightmares to read about)

There are some very interesting conversations to be had around the place of ego in a church and where the boundaries of care and narcissism blur, and those ideas kept me reading even as the personalities became grating, frustrating, and sometimes infuriating to follow. But this does not feel like the book Griswold sought to write (and we learn in the prologue that it's not, because of the pandemic), because it doesn't reveal anything about modern Christian thought or service but ends up just another exploration of human failing.

Hear me when I say: this wasn’t bad, but for me, it was forgettable. Eliza Griswold is a great writer and journalist, also make note o that. However, I felt myself starting to get bored because I kept getting confused sometimes with all the different people here (a lot of whom are related) and moving parts of the Circle of Hope churches and the dynamics of it all. I think reading this might have been more successful for me, but I’m still happy to have learned what I did about this congregation of believers!!

As I read the closing Benediction to Circle of Hope, I picked up a pen to jot down my favorite lines and to journal my response. Eliza Griswold has woven together the deep stories of a social-justice-oriented evangelical church in its final five years and created a tapestry that points to the human experiences of death, mourning, hope and resurrection-- with love at the center.

This book is a powerful addition to the ongoing conversation about the future of The Church. But it's not just that. It's also about how an organization of imperfect people devoted to a community of liberation still confronts power imbalances and various forms of social violence, including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, and homophobia. Ministers, lay leaders, and anyone who loves the church but has known grief because of that love will connect with Circle of Hope.

Many thanks to FSG and NetGalley for a free copy for review.

This is the perfect book for those of us who have watched (or are watching) a faith community dissolve as its leaders attempt to placate/solve the ever-shifting demands of culture. It’s a well written account, inspiring at first (I found myself cheering for this church’s early gatherings and dreams, even knowing how their story ends). I thought the author did a remarkable job drawing the people at the heart of this church, such that readers are free to form our own opinions of the unexpected ways things played out. As with every story of a fervent, family-like church that implodes, there are many red-flags described here, and the value of this book may be in the clear examples it offers of how badly things go when leaders make anything other than helping people connect with God their top priority. It’s such an easy trap to fall into - the allure of being the people & place where culture’s biggest problems will be solved is undeniable. But it’s not the call of the church. I’m glad to have read this book, and I recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book.

Eliza Griswold provides an inside view of the life of Circle of Hope, a Christian congregation committed to justice, but torn apart by its supposed commitments. The author takes the reader on a fascinating journey as COVID and anti racism efforts challenge the church. She draws the key figures with a great deal of sensitivity, but brings them alive in a compelling way. This book illustrates very well the challenges many churches have faced in the crises of the past three years.

This was written with a strong, steady hand--clear and coherent, but the content itself did not nab me.

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.