ELIZA GRISWOLD. Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Pp. 332. $30.00 (U.S.)
When a book is published by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, excerpted in The New Yorker, blurbed by Christian luminaries such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Christian Wiman, and it’s about people you know, it’s a must read. You also read with eyes wide open, and a strong blend of fear and anticipation.
Circle of Hope is a work of “immersive journalism” by Eliza Griswold, who describes herself as “a pastor’s kid . . . who has spent much of [her] life at the edge of belief” (3). The book takes its title from the name of a uniquely shaped Brethren in Christ congregation founded in Philadelphia in 1996. In 2021, the community decided to leave the denomination, as their pastors’ credentials were threatened for choosing full inclusion of LGBTQ+ members. Circle leaders made this choice as part of their “repentance for the Circle’s homophobic past” (242).
Griswold first encountered members of Circle of Hope (COH) in 2019 in Philly’s Kensington neighborhood, long reputed for its violence and widespread opioid addiction: “I spotted half a dozen white men and women . . . [whose] fresh faces and starry eyes spoke of devotion to something greater: a church, I suspected” (6). Griswold then backs up for a sometimes superficial overview of the Jesus People movement of the 1960s and varied expressions of radical evangelicalism as background for COH. Introducing herself to the pastors of the four congregations that then made up Circle, she asked if she could “follow a group of people attempting to live with Christ at the center of all things.” (7). With their agreement, Griswold joined in public witness events, business meetings, zoom leadership sessions, and personal conversations over the next few years.
Griswold shapes the narrative in chapters that cycle four times through the lives of the four COH pastors: Ben White, Julie Hoke, Rachel Sensenig, and Jonny Rashid. In one additional chapter, she offers the voice of Bethany Stewart, who led Circle’s Mobilizing Because Black Lives Matter compassion team, and with years of experience at Roots of Justice, “an Anabaptist collective of anti-racism trainers” (159, 196).
Griswold recounts the progression of the debates as Circle of Hope leaders and members grappled with more than navigating LGBTQ inclusion. They ministered in urban environments facing economic decline, drug abuse, gun violence, and racial inequality. Nearly all of Griswold’s time within the community took place during the coronavirus pandemic, and as Philadelphians along with the rest of the nation responded to the murder of George Floyd. As pastoral leaders, Rashid and White both had seminary training, while Hoke and Sensenig did not, adding both gender (196) and educational status distinctions to shape their work. Further, interwoven with the stories of each leader, she unfurled the influence of Circle’s founding couple, Rod and Gwen White.
As young Christians in southern California, the Whites had wanted to affiliate with a group that would both affirm “radical reform” and represent “a larger collective” (21). They sent out letters, received a response from a Brethren in Christ bishop who then visited their intentional community, and joined the denomination (21-22). Moving eastward in 1995, the Whites soon settled in Philadelphia with the vision of planting a new kind of Christian community.
By the time Griswold encountered COH, the four pastors were struggling over “what would soon openly divide them: this question of what following Jesus required, focusing outward on healing the world or addressing first the sins within yourself” (41). Rod had stepped back from his formal leadership role, yet “despite [Rod’s] protests and stated desires, Circle still adhered to Rod’s vision” (38). While the Whites’ founding vision sought to engage issues as non-political followers of Jesus, Griswold observes that “well-meaning white people at Circle had engaged in social justice without stopping to acknowledge their own privileges” (p.41). During the pandemic, when differences arose about how to conduct on-line worship, “it seemed to all four that the more power Rod lost in shaping the church, the more critical and undermining he became of them” (p.127). To further complicate the situation, Ben White was one of Rod and Gwen’s four sons, who had grown up at COH. In 2021, the Whites were asked to leave the church. Ben resigned as pastor in 2022.
Griswold quietly references her own reasons for wondering about the struggles at COH. The book is dedicated to her father, Frank Griswold, the presiding Episcopal bishop who consecrated the first openly gay Episcopal priest in 2003. “Some evenings after dinner . . . I watched my usually reserved dad put his head in his hands and cry over his failure to hold the church together” (4). She also points to internal institutional failures that lay underneath COH conflicts: “like most churches, [COH] had no human resources department or handbook to follow” (170). Unlike many churches, COH did not follow “ethical professional guidelines requiring departing pastors to take at least a year away from their former congregation” (81).
Further, Griswold does not hold back from offering searing glimpses at the COH pastors’ lives. During team meetings, Ben swore, shouted, hung up on the others, and hurled insults (170). In the conflict with the Whites, Jonny declared publicly that “Jesus had plenty of parables and stories about what to do with folks who are operating in bad faith” (177). When Rachel pointed out to Jonny that he was talking over both her and Julie, “he dismissed her claims about patriarchy as more deflection of racism, saying later, ‘That’s what white women do’” (191). In one pastoral meeting about COH’s internal racism, Julie shouted at Rachel and accused her of “terrible leading” when Rachel tried to articulate a way to “bring along” white congregation members (238). Rachel called Jonny “predatory” for carefully tracking Ben’s emotional responses (192) As I read, I wondered why the four leaders allowed her to publish some of the material in the book. Their permission, she recounts, came “because the Spirit had led them to say yes” (328).
Intersections of family and church, complex relationships that have long shaped the personality of the Brethren in Christ, persisted in the COH story, for good and for ill. When Rod and Gwen gathered their adult children to talk about what was happening to them, Gwen declared: “One of the reasons we made this church was for you. We didn’t know where else you could be Christians” (214). In another family connection, Julie’s brother-in-law was the Brethren in Christ bishop who oversaw the region in which COH affiliated (63-64).
Although not central to the narrative, Griswold references Brethren in Christ connections throughout the COH story. A journalist rather than a historian, she erroneously references a Brethren in Christ Love Feast in Philadelphia more than fifty years before the first River Brethren emerged in central Pennsylvania (42). Her use of the identifier “Anabaptist” for the Brethren in Christ is too narrow for the denomination’s self-identification (See “Tracing our theological roots,” https://bicus.org/about/history/). Still, both honestly and mostly without prejudice, she outlines the economic questions shaping COH’s last days, given that the national church was legally entitled to seize COH’s assets when they left the denomination (241). In January 2024, COH was formally dissolved. Jonny now pastors a Mennonite congregation in the city, Rachel is a hospice chaplain, Ben is spiritual director in a retirement community, and Julie leads a congregation in formation in Germantown. (See the review of Jonny Rashid’s book Jesus Takes a Side in the August 2023 edition of Brethren in Christ History and Life.)
By ending the book with an account of her father’s death in 2023, Griswold suggests that this story reflects that “maybe churches need to die” (331). While she may understand the death of COH as due to theological and political differences, the narrative foregrounds the bitterness that grew in personal relationships as those differences were encountered. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams describes Griswold’s account as “stubbornly hopeful.” I wonder how deep must be the dives into the practices, commitments, and identities of other Brethren in Christ readers for us to read Circle of Hope as that sign of hope.