A Review — Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

A chance encounter in 2019 sparked Eliza Griswold’s five-year immersive reporting project with Circle of Hope Church in Philadelphia. She was in downtown Philly and came across one of the church members melting AK-47s into garden tools, in the spirit of the biblical call to beat swords into plowshares. As she explained to ABC News, she saw his group — young, tattooed, pierced — and realized, “‘This is a church.’ And I [knew] these young people are worth time, getting to know.”

The result of years of reporting is her new book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize winner (and daughter of the late Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold) chronicles the struggles of the progressive, evangelical Anabaptist congregation and its four lead pastors to survive myriad obstacles, including generational shifts in leadership, the need for anti-racism work, and conflicting views of what social justice looks like for Christians.

The church was founded by two self-described Jesus freaks, Rod and Gwen White, in 1996. Their aim was to “build a beloved community of those who might disagree about all kinds of particularities but who shared a desire to worship the Lord together and live according to the tenets of Scripture” (26). By the time Griswold stepped onto the scene in 2019, Rod and Gwen had begun stepping away from direct leadership and the four congregations of Circle of Hope were led by the next generation of pastors — Julie Hoke, Rachel Sensenig, Jonny Rashid, and Ben White, the son of Rod and Gwen.

Reading Circle of Hope in 2024, one might assume Griswold’s objective was to report the ravages of the COVID pandemic on one American church. In 2019, though, she had no way to predict it, let alone the effect it would have on congregations across the world. While the pandemic did drastically affect life at Circle of Hope, it isn’t the driving force behind the church’s crisis. Instead, it serves as the backdrop while the 2020 murder of George Floyd acts as the catalyst.

The people in Circle of Hope had always seen themselves as countercultural, trying to bring the kingdom of Heaven to a broken world. The anti-racism movement that expanded in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others forced Circle of Hope’s members to question to what extent they were part of the problem. “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” (41).

Griswold’s narrative recognizes the ambiguities in which Circle of Hope sat, both within itself and in its wider cultural context: it was both evangelical and progressive; it fiercely defended social justice yet foundationally rejected activism; it aimed to transcend identifiers like race and class but  its congregants were majority white within a racially mixed city; it defined itself as non-hierarchical at the same time Rod and Gwen White hampered emerging leaders with their inability to let go of “their” church. Most of all, the people of Circle of Hope were desperate to transform themselves into who Jesus would have them be, and yet — like the Apostle Paul — the harder they tried, the more they found themselves lacking.

Griswold reflects that ambiguity in how she organizes and narrates the story: each chapter is a POV from one of the lead ministers of the four congregations in the Circle — Ben, Julie, Rachel, and Jonny. Appropriately, these chapters are written in the third person, but Griswold effectively crafts the narrative to relate events from the perspective and mindset of each minister. Thus, events might be described multiple times but in very different ways. For instance, in Julie’s chapter, during the ministers’ anti-racism work, Ben labels himself “so-called white” (139); Griswold describes the reaction of Nelson Hewitt, the church’s original anti-racism consultant: “This seemed bizarre … Afterward [Hewitt] talked to Ben about ‘owning your whiteness.’”

In Ben’s POV chapter, she revisits the moment from his perspective: “[He] told Hewitt, ‘Of course there’s work to do to uncover my racism. But I worry about essentializing whiteness in my identity’” (158). Although she doesn’t let him off the hook, the different context gives a slightly more charitable slant to the gaffe.

Similarly, in Ben’s and Rachel’s chapters, Jonny, an Egyptian American head minister at Circle, often comes across as power-hungry, combative, and ambitious. In Jonny’s and Julie’s chapters, however, a reader can find how his actions might be justified (or, in some cases, misinterpreted): “When Ben accused Jonny of ‘brokering power,’ Jonny argued that there was nothing wrong with doing so. He felt that his efforts to ‘amass power’ by holding meetings, building consensus, and influencing leaders were means by which people of color fomented necessary change” (170).

The strength of this approach is that Griswold can present the story of Circle of Hope as more than just a microcosm of the decline of Christianity in the United States, although she does broaden her scope at times to chart the path of evangelicalism in the 20th century. The major figures of Circle — pastors Julie, Rachel, Jonny, and Ben; Rod and Gwen; Bethany, the congregant turned anti-racism consultant for the church — come across as rounded individuals, flawed but decent, deeply committed to preaching and living the gospel and pained when they can’t agree how best to do it. When working toward anti-racism, Rachel and Julie “butt heads” about which voices to include. Griswold writes, “Rachel insisted that they include all voices of color, even those who hadn’t experienced racism at the church … ‘Can we widen the room?’…. What Rachel viewed as widening, Julie considered making room for whiteness” (282). Because Griswold has taken us inside the head of each pastor, we can appreciate the contexts from which they speak. Even when we disagree with a pastor (and there are few cases presented with a clear right and wrong opinion), there’s no real villain of the story.

The tradeoff to Griswold’s approach is that while the story is engaging, it can be disjointed, jumping back and forth in time when the POV changes each chapter. Further, in Griswold’s effort to include as many voices as possible, some key players, like Circle members Audrey Robinson and Marcus Biddle, are shoehorned into chapters. Others, like Rod and Gwen White, end up overtaking a chapter that ostensibly focuses on one of the lead pastors. The figure Griswold struggles most to balance seems to be Bethany Stewart; she is pivotal to the conflict and growth within Circle of Hope, and yet only gets a single POV chapter. Given Bethany’s importance, Griswold’s choice makes her single chapter seem like an afterthought.

Despite these minor quibbles, Circle of Hope is thoroughly readable — it’s not only a captivating story, but also a valuable exercise in empathy and humility for people of faith.

Even if Griswold didn’t make it clear in the beginning of her book that the congregation was destined to dissolve, readers could figure it out easily. After all, the church’s Facebook page announces the fact:

Circle of Hope has disbanded as a church. Circle of Hope operated as a network of congregations in Philadelphia and South Jersey for almost thirty years. One congregation closed, and the other three are reforming as new churches. None of the congregations chose to retain the Circle of Hope name or identity.

There’s something a little disappointing in Griswold’s acceptance of Circle’s dissolution — perhaps in an effort to cultivate the book’s titular “hope,” she muses that “[maybe] churches need to die … to make themselves new again.” She praises the pastors’ growth after the breakup of the church: “there are hints of moving forward by breaking the circle and not repeating it” (331). As a Christian, though, I mourn the wilting of this community so committed to bringing the saving love of Jesus to the world.