Circle of hope

Circle of Hope is hard to read—but harder to put down.

This new book profiles the unraveling of Circle of Hope, a radical evangelical church in the Philadelphia area. The author, Pulitzer Prize-winning Eliza Griswold, got permission in 2019 to become embedded in the daily lives of the four pastors, wanting to know more about this kind of evangelical—ones very different from the evangelicals who typically make the news.

Then 2020 hit. The thriving church—which consisted of four congregations, each pastored by one member of the four-member pastoral team—suffered existentially from a series of challenges that came to a head that year: the pandemic, race, whether to be open and affirming, and “founder’s syndrome.”

Several facets of this story were especially fascinating for me: I had met one of the pastors two years ago at an Anabaptist conference. Like some of the pastors, I had grown up in the evangelical world, and know well the language, personalities, and theology that they came from. And, because Circle of Hope was a congregation in the Brethren in Christ denomination, the emphasis on Anabaptist beliefs and history were deeply familiar.

The author does confuse the Brethren in Christ with the Church of the Brethren and our Schwarzenau siblings, mistakenly attributing to them our American beginnings at the Wissahickon Creek in Germantown, Pa., on Christmas Day in 1723. The Brethren in Christ came into being several decades later—about 1780.

But that imprecision doesn’t make less true the rest of the story, which is recounted in real time. Through the author, the reader sits in on countless tense Zoom meetings, in-person gatherings, and email arguments. The book covers the sad and messy three-year dissolution of this group of gifted pastors, who seemed to have everything needed to lead an exceptional church.

It turns out that thinking of their church as exceptional was one of the pitfalls. They were just as human as other followers of Jesus, and their congregations just as vulnerable in the storms of the last few years.

Circle of Hope grappled painfully with three things that are difficult in the Church of the Brethren as well: How to disagree while still valuing collective decision-making. How to navigate the identities of race and sex. And how to open the circle.

That is, when should the comfort of a circle be broken open? When does something that looks like death become the birthing of a new thing?

In an eloquent benediction for the book, Griswold speaks of the “third way” that Anabaptists treasure, and she concludes that God’s third way is mercy.