Shortly before Black History Month in 2020, Bethany Stewart, a member of a Philadelphia church called Circle of Hope, asked pastor Rod White if she might draft topical prayers for the church website. No, said the pastor. As journalist Eliza Griswold tells the story, White said they “didn’t need prayers for Black History Month,” because the church’s “teachings were already ‘naturally anti-racist.’” Stewart wrote the prayers anyway—they invoked rapper Cardi B, the folk song “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” joy—and posted them on the Facebook page of Circle Mobilizing Because Black Lives Matter, one of the church’s “compassion teams,” which, among other activities, hosted book clubs and teach-ins and raised money for the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund.
This anecdote seems prosaic but in fact is illuminating in several ways. Consider: it shows something about lines of authority in a local church—a layperson (Black, female) asks the pastor (white, male) for advice, then flouts his instructions. It shows clergy and laity alike navigating questions like “How should the church respond to the calendar of broader American culture?” and “How should the church manifest its ethical commitments?” And it shows something about prayer—that prayer was important enough to be the vehicle of those larger debates, and that prayer is protean, by design able to speak to present-day concerns and accommodate contemporary references.
This vignette comes early in Griswold’s new book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church. The small, Anabaptist church of the title was founded in 1996, but Griswold’s interest began in 2019, on a corner in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where Griswold observed a klatsch of white, thrift store-clad men and women (“They were punk-rock, but their fresh faces and starry eyes spoke of devotion to something greater: a church, I suspected”) melting down AK-47s, transforming the guns into gardening tools: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Had the pandemic not happened, had George Floyd not been murdered, had Griswold begun her reporting in 1999 rather than 2019, one can imagine that she might have turned out a richly detailed but predictable account of “the other evangelicals,” no less politically minded than the religious right but focused on ending wars rather than ending constitutional protections to abortion.
But, as Griswold writes, practitioners of “immersion journalism” never know where their reporting will take them, or by which byways: “It’s like going to a stranger’s car, knocking on the window, and asking to climb into the back seat and ride along for a while. The plan might be to arrive in Vermont in a week’s time only to end up in Vegas four years later, with three flat tires.” In this case, the potholed road took Griswold through conflict about church leadership, about race, about Christian sexual ethics. She spent four years observing, interviewing members of, and hanging out at Circle of Hope, whose pastors and congregants hoped to incarnate in the contemporary urban landscape Jesus’ ethics of service and love. What she saw was a lot of worship, friendship, and activism, and also a lot of insult and failure to navigate disagreement. Circle of Hope was filled with people of the best intentions, torn apart by questions of race, gender, and power, and often beset by the narcissism of small differences. The church disbanded earlier this year.
Conflict among religious people is a motif in Griswold’s journalism. The Tenth Parallel (2010) examines Christianity and Islam in Nigeria, Sudan, the Philippines. Amity and Prosperity, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, charts the effects of fracking on a family and a community. The churches of fracked Pennsylvania were not immune to the conflicts between and among “reasonable and intelligent people disagree[ing] passionately over what was best for their town.” As one of the book’s main characters notes near the end of the book, “We don’t talk to Mr. Yeager now, period. I saw him at a dinner one time and I didn’t even like being at the same church dinner.”
Religious conflict has also been part of Griswold’s own life in and around churches. Griswold tells us in the second paragraph of Circle of Hope that she is a “pastor’s kid,” elaborating that her father wasn’t any old pastor, but was Frank Griswold—one-time presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who consecrated the church’s first openly gay bishop and who therefore presided over the Episcopal Church during the years when it was painfully riven by conflict about sexual ethics. Griswold recalls “a modern schism in real time” that left the church “divided … for good. Some evenings after dinner around our kitchen table, I watched my usually reserved dad put his head in his hands and cry over his failure to hold the church together.” Frank Griswold died as his daughter concluded her reporting on Circle of Hope, and the book is dedicated to him. Which is to say, the controversies that hammered the Episcopal Church in the early part of this century are part of the framing of Circle of Hope. Circle of Hope doesn’t perfectly repeat the fights of Frank Griswold’s Episcopal Church, but it certainly echoes them.
Circle of Hope was filled with people of the best intentions, torn apart by questions of race, gender, and power, and often beset by the narcissism of small differences.
Griswold’s narrative moves mainly among the perspectives of the church’s pastors (Jonny Rashid, Ben White, Rachel Sensenig, and Julie Hoke), and it’s not easy to summarize just what felled Circle of Hope. A central register of conflict was anti-racism. Everyone more or less agreed that the church should fight racism in the world and examine its own internalized racism—but the devil’s in the details, and from the start, nobody at Circle could agree on what fighting anti-racism entailed. Their disagreements threatened to overwhelm any good they hoped to accomplish. In the 1990s, founding pastors Gwen and Rod White consulted Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice, then prominent in social justice-oriented evangelical circles for their racial reconciliation work. Perkins and Rice told the Whites that unless they “were willing to make racial reconciliation their church’s sole purpose … their effort was likely to fail.” That advice “disheartened” the Whites, who “had envisioned Circle of Hope addressing all manner of social ills, not solely racism,” but they attempted to address racism nonetheless, by, for example, establishing “a racially diverse intentional community of peace builders” next to West Philly’s Malcolm X Memorial Park.
After George Floyd’s murder, on May 25, 2020, the urgency and centrality of racism again became a matter of dispute—“determining the relationship between anti-racism and following Jesus would threaten to destroy the church,” Griswold writes. Church leaders were horrified by police brutality, but disagreed amongst themselves about whether or not Circle should circulate a condemnatory petition. The three white pastors were not of one mind about how to receive or respond to critiques from Black parishioners and from the one pastor of color, Jonny Rashid. An outside DEI consultant was hired to help the church examine its own “internalized white supremacy.” Sessions with the consultant, “like everything else at Circle, devolved into argument,” and after five sessions, the consultant declared the work “unsafe” and quit.
Over the months, insults zinged back and forth. One congregant took to Twitter to accuse another of “white fragility.” Ben accused Jonny of “brokering power.” Jonny responded that he had every right to amass power. Jonny and Bethany judged Rachel’s responses to Slack conversations about racism too slow and sparse. They “tagg[ed] her in chats and direct[ed] her to reply in writing.” Rachel “felt hounded.”
There were other registers of conflict. Brethren in Christ, the denomination of which Circle of Hope was a part, declared as recently as 2020 that “lesbianism [and] homosexuality have no place in the life in Christ.” Circle’s pastors and most of the church’s congregants increasingly found the stance on same-sex practice untenable. Circle committed itself to “becoming affirming” and to “queer inclusion,” adopting two queer-affirming “proverbs” that spelled out Circle’s support for same-sex marriage, its acceptance of “LGBTQ folks” in church leadership, and its embrace of the invitations queer people offered everyone in the community to reflect more vigorously on their “authentic selves.” Eventually, one of the pastors came out.
All this carried costs. The denomination had the right, in the event of a local church’s violating doctrine, to claim the church’s assets. Even in the best of times, sparring with the Brethren in Christ hierarchy in an attempt to hold onto cash and property would have taxed the church. As the property settlement dragged on, people stopped giving money to the church; disaffected by all the internal conflict, they also worried that the money would end up in the hands of the denomination. In the end, the church ran out of money to pay its pastors, and the deal Circle took from the denomination allowed the church to walk away with two buildings that had been run as thrift stores. Those stores could then, in theory, stay open independently, but the church itself closed.
Circle of Hope was also navigating generational transition—the founding pastors’ retirements did not go smoothly. Instead of leaving cleanly, Rod White ostensibly retired—a word he hated—yet stayed on as “development pastor” to advise the new clergy team. Even stickier, the Whites hired a congregant to serve as a contractor on the rehab of their retirement condo. When he failed either to do the work or to return the $50,000 the Whites had given him, the Whites turned to Circle pastors for support, and eventually sent an email to Circle’s leadership team detailing their plight. A small melee ensued, with some at Circle seeing the Whites as victims, others judging their email a power move and evidence of “more of the problematic culture of whiteness at Circle.”
And though more muted than the debates about racism, there was discord around questions of gendered power, too. During the pastors’ weekly meetings, the two female pastors were routinely interrupted and talked over. “When [Rachel] and Julie were speaking in a meeting, laying out a thought on process or theology, Jonny would launch into a new idea over them,” writes Griswold, who observed hundreds of hours of meetings. “It wasn’t in response or rebuttal; it was as if he didn’t hear their voices. When [Rachel] attempted to point this out to Jonny, he dismissed her claims about patriarchy as more deflection of racism, saying later, ‘That’s what white women do.’”
In Circle of Hope, Griswold is not, I presume, writing chiefly for historians in, say, 2125, but I kept thinking about them. They will treasure this granular, vivid record of a church at worship and a church doing good in the world—a record of people fighting and praying, and of the meanings people attach to and find in their local church. There’s a whole dissertation chapter, someday, in that episode of a laywoman writing emotive and politically-minded prayers, asking her pastor for permission to circulate them, and then contravening his prohibition. Indeed, the account of Bethany Stewart’s Black History Month prayers encapsulates much of what’s revelatory in Griswold’s reporting. Consider how few such accounts of the church survive from the fourth century, or the twelfth.
Griswold brings a keen, nuanced eye to the ritual practices that hold congregants and pastors alike to God and to one another. From those first pruning hooks fashioned from molten firearms, many at Circle found gardening both soothing and political. Julie grew sweet potato vine, zinnias, and black-eyed Susans, and passed her rare moments of solitude among them. Bethany, one of Circle’s few Black members, planted cucumbers and tomatoes, and wrote about gardening on her blog. “Tending the earth feels like conspiring with God,” she wrote. “Gardening could be a source of healing for Black women who’d been severed from the earth through the violence of slavery.”
Baking was another practice that gave spiritual nurture, carried theological lessons, and arranged power. On Easter, church members partook of “sugar cookies, iced with a red cross.” They were, in one pastor’s explanation, to be “enjoy[ed] … together as evidence of God’s sweetness for us in the power of death being broken.” The cookies also “recalled traditional hot cross buns, over which Gwen had toiled until they’d proven to be too much work—‘unreasonable for three hundred and fifty people,’ Gwen put it…. To some, the cookies also represented the screwed-up role of women at Circle, who were supposed to be revolutionaries but were, in practical fact, more bound to motherhood and to baking than to being pastors. Tentatively, Julie had broached the subject with Rachel several weeks earlier, and, to her relief, Rachel had her own misgivings. ‘We can use store-bought dough,’ Rachel said. It was the smallest of shifts, yet Julie felt relief in Rachel’s willingness to embrace rest, ease, and change.”
And Griswold is perceptively attentive to church timekeeping. Although generally critical of formal liturgy, Circle of Hope did observe the basic seasons of the Christian calendar. The penitential season of Lent seems especially important to the church. Griswold notes, for example, that a particularly divisive email “dropped in the middle of Lent,” and that it was during Lent that Ben discussed, on his blog, repenting of racism. At a (virtual) church gathering during Lent 2020, Ben said that Lent was a time for “seeing things for what they are, and saying something about it.” Julie “correct[ed]” him, saying, in Griswold’s paraphrase, “Lent wasn’t only about addressing wrongs in the external world. It required turning inward, naming your sins, and repenting.” As Griswold observes, this exchange foreshadowed the church’s fractures: “Here were the stirrings of 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.”
Circle’s pastors disagreed amongst themselves about the proper relationship of church and world. Ben thought that “political protests, including those for the progressive causes Ben agreed with, could get in the way of following Jesus.” Jonny wrote a book called Jesus Takes a Side, “for oppressed Christians and their allies who are frustrated by the neutrality and complicity of political quietists.” Questions of political theology and ecclesiology are implicit in Circle of Hope. What is the church, finally, and how does the church relate to its surrounding, ambient culture? Racism and Christians’ attempts to address racism make a particularly sharp occasion of inquiry into the church’s relationship with ambient culture, for race and racism are both internal to and external to the church. When George Floyd’s murder prompted some at Circle to reflect more vigorously on “Circle of Hope’s white supremacy culture,” that’s exactly an instance of the church being instructed about itself by the world.
But after I finished reading Circle of Hope, I didn’t shelve it next to H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic treatise of Christian social ethics Christ and Culture. Rather, I shelved it alongside David Hein’s Noble Powell and the Episcopal Establishment in the Twentieth Century, Heidi Neumark’s Sanctuary, and Garret Keizer’s A Dresser of Sycamore Trees—memoirs and monographs that depict, in intimate detail, the vocation of the church pastor. For that is what it seems to me this book most strikingly is: an unusual, discomforting, illuminating portrait of four people trying to pastor a church.
Griswold is judicious; she’s bracketed her own judgments, and none of Circle’s four pastors emerges as an angel. The pastoral arts, in all their wonder and all their deformities, are on full display. Perhaps most centrally, Circle of Hope shows pastors navigating conflict. Also pastors celebrating baptisms, teaching classes, tallying numbers of worship attenders, marching in protests, and sending emails. And Griswold depicts the pastor at prayer: “To draw closer to Jesus, she spent early hours in contemplative prayer on her cozy living room couch, where she wrapped herself in a red chenille blanket and dived into her soul,” Griswold writes of Rachel. “She saw Jesus the mother on the cross, arms outstretched, forced open by nails through his palms, welcoming everyone and every trouble. A river flowed from the hole pierced in his side. He didn’t speak to her exactly, but she knew he was asking her to stay open, even when it hurt, to welcome skeptics to come and see, as they moved together in the common effort to name how the sin of racism had co-opted the body of the church.”
At the end of Circle of Hope, Griswold, who is largely invisible in the book, returns to the page. Her father, the great Episcopal eminence, has died. As she leaves his funeral, Griswold “glanced into the forest of mourners and was startled to catch sight of Julie…. I hadn’t imagined her visiting my world, and yet there she was, mourning the loss of a man she’d never met, as this, among so many other unseen acts of service, is what a pastor does.” That’s the book’s last sentence, its concluding thought not about conflict or institutional decline, but about “what a pastor does.” Perhaps, then, it’s not only my predilections that dispose me to see Circle of Hope as an entry in the literature of pastoral arts, but Griswold’s own needs as well.
It can be a great pleasure and a great strength of long-form journalism that the journalist withholds judgment. But sometimes that withholding can be a frustration. Some journalistic or ethnographic narratives offer strong, submerged arguments, scents for the reader to follow. In Circle of Hope, such arguments are difficult to detect. It’s hard to spend so much time in the company of the narrator without asking, at last, what she thinks. Especially when there is so much to think about.
For example, churches close all the time, for all sorts of reasons: because people move away; because of natural disaster; because of the Islamization of North Africa. Is the closure of Circle of Hope best read as an instance in the larger decline of American churches? Jacob—a brother of one of Circle’s pastors and a son of the founding pastors—seems to think so: “‘Churches used to be places where people actively built communities together,’ Jacob said…. ‘All churches have to offer now is intellectual affinity, and these kinds of affinities die,’ he said. He cited as evidence a 2021 Gallup poll he’d recently read, which, for the first time since Gallup had begun polling, found that less than half of Americans belonged to churches. The following year, Pew would predict that Christians would shrink from 64 percent of Americans to as low as 35 percent in 2070.”
Jacob wasn’t a member of Circle, and Griswold twice describes him as a “perceptive outsider”—which is to say, she describes him as she might describe herself. And Griswold does seem to suggest elsewhere that the demise of Circle of Hope is imbricated with larger ecclesial hemorrhaging: Circle’s membership declined between 2017 and 2020, but this “pattern of declining numbers,” she explained, “was a national trend.” In one sense, it seems almost tautological that church closures are part of Christianity’s decline. A church-goer whose church closes may not begin attending another church. And the bitterness that leads churches to close may reinforce feelings of distaste among the cultured despisers. More broadly, to those devoted to churches in shrinking denominations, church closures can feel like so many tolling bells.
So is Circle’s closure characteristic of our age? We are so accustomed to bowling, knitting, or fishing alone—or else only with the politically likeminded—that even disagreements of emphasis among people ostensibly committed to anti-racism can quickly calcify, and divide a community. If Americans practiced disagreement-without-schism at the garden club, would they be more able to remain harmoniously together in church? (Then again, don’t at least some schools of Christian ethics suggest the direction should be reversed—that formation in a church community, where difference finds sacramental unity, ought to make it possible to garden with someone who disagrees with you about school vouchers?) Griswold attributes to Jacob the idea that the “[s]ocial and political polarization had fractured many [churches]: sitting in pews with like-minded people was more important than coming together to worship.”
That said, the particular sin of disdain for people one judges unsuitable seems to predate the polarization that Bill Bishop dubbed “the big sort.” After my second read of Circle of Hope, my mind turned to someone I don’t readily associate with Eliza Griswold: C. S. Lewis, or, more specifically, his creature Screwtape. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s 1942 book, the demon of the title mentors his nephew in the art of prising newly converted Christians from the church. A great ally is found in the other people who are there. “When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided,” Screwtape says. “You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.”
“Social and political polarization” are not just about the substance on which I and, say, people who would never read this journal disagree. It’s about what I presume to be true about the people who hold views I don’t like. This is how the tendency of churches to split apart over issues comes to pass. Disagreement about a bedrock issue—anti-racism, gender roles, Christology—or even disagreement about whether something is a bedrock issue in the first place spills over into judgments about people.
Churches are often, inevitably, marked by internal disagreement. Some of those disagreements are creedal—what do church members believe about this or that—but many of them are ethical and practical: the church has to do something one way or the other. Should we plant a “Creation Care” sign in front of the parish house? Should the pastor preach “political” sermons? Should the church Facebook page include prayers pegged to Black History Month? The Facebook page is either going to include them, or not. You can hum along comfortably enough holding different views about immigration policy, or about whether the second person of the Trinity was enfleshed before the Fall, but disagreements previously navigable sometimes become inescapable when the disagreement is practical and there’s no tertium quid.
Indeed, when a particular church has disagreements, there are always two ultimate questions in play: Should we plant the creation care sign? But also: does our disagreement about this mean we can’t worship together anymore?
In the history of many Protestant denominations in the U.S., that question, of course, took sharpest form around slavery. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians answered in the affirmative: This is the kind of disagreement that means we can’t worship together anymore. My own denomination—Frank Griswold’s denomination, the one in which Eliza Griswold was raised—did not answer it thus, and when I first learned this history twenty-five years ago, the standard monograph attributed Episcopalians’ unity to northern, high church Episcopalians’ “emphasis on the sacred nature of the church” and its “concern with unity as a mark of the spirit of God,” which “retarded any radical action on the question of slavery.” Much to my surprise, I still occasionally run into churchmen who find this avoidance of schism theologically admirable rather than shameful.
I am writing in my office at the small Episcopal church I serve as priest. Nearly twenty years ago, this church came close to closing—for many reasons, as ever, but all entwined with the debates over sexuality that Griswold evokes when she writes of her father weeping at the kitchen table. The questions of queer inclusion that contributed to the fracturing at Circle of Hope are now largely settled in the Episcopal Church. But the larger question underneath Circle’s demise presses upon me every day: what kinds of disagreements can and should a church be able to navigate?
I previously served a church whose small congregation included energized Republicans and equally dedicated Democrats. I took great pride in this—at a moment in our national life when people are so thoroughly sorted, this group of people came together, despite deeply disagreeing about matters of significance. We listened to Scripture together, we received Communion together, we helped provision a soup kitchen together. Now, though, I wonder if we remained harmonious by generally evading discussion of that about which we disagreed. And if that’s right, I wonder if such ecclesial unity by evasion is to be praised or lamented—or, probably, both.
Griswold titles the last chapter of Circle of Hope “A Benediction,” a blessing. Reflecting on the words “Go in peace,” uttered by her father at the end of countless church services and uttered by Jesus to the woman who perfumed his feet in Luke 7, Griswold invites us to consider not only all that Ben, Julie, Rachel, and Jonny lost when Circle of Hope shuttered. We might also imagine them leaving with some measure of—or at least moving toward—peace.
I wonder if we remained harmonious by generally evading discussion of that about which we disagreed.
Griswold then turns seamlessly to an account of her father’s death (thereby linking that death to the death of Circle of Hope). It is, once again, the middle of Lent, and Frank Griswold asks his daughter to read him the Sunday lesson—the story from the Gospel of John about the woman caught in adultery. The elders want to stone her, but Jesus says that he who has no sin should cast the first stone, and then bends down to write inscrutably in the dust. As Griswold glosses the passage, “the elders … are forced, by Jesus’s question, to interrogate their lives and search their souls until they surrender their judgmentalism and acknowledge that they, too, are flawed humans…. Once we acknowledge our mutual vulnerability, we are less willing to wield the weapon of condemnation.”
Griswold then returns to Circle of Hope. “Maybe churches need to die, to rid themselves of their old bodies, their advanced pathologies, to make themselves new again…. The four pastors humbled one another, or perhaps ‘harrowed’ is the better word: raking one another’s souls, like fields, and freeing them to grow.”
This raking image is beautiful. It makes me picture a wildflower field, and wish for my soul to be raked. But I confess I’m not sure what it comes to. It’s certainly true that some disagreements can be productive, even transfigurative, for those who undergo them. But when I think about the disagreements that rive churches, religious leaders moved to self-examination by Jesus’ instruction in shared sinfulness do not come quickly to mind. Rather, I think of something else Jesus says, in another Gospel passage read during Lent: “Away with you, Satan.” The kinds of disagreements that divide churches are those in which one party thinks the other party has deemed nonnegotiable something untenable. The offending party has forgotten Jesus. They have lost the plot. These are rarely disagreements that resolve with a sense of mutual vulnerability.
Circle of Hope shows us a church’s struggling and failing to endure through disagreements about matters that at least some protagonists consider fundamental. There will inevitably be issues for churches (as for every other human community) on which resolution is not possible—issues about which, for some church members, something seems so clear and important that to deny it (its substance, or its centrality) would be like denying something nonnegotiable about one’s self. A question for the churches is which those issues are—and whether, at the moment, the number of issues we judge irresolvable is larger than it should be.