When Progressive Churches Fail: Lessons from Circle of Hope

My thoughts on perfectionism and leadership conflict and the disbanding of Circle of Hope, a progressive Anabaptist community, as documented by Eliza Griswold

I had never heard of Circle of Hope prior to learning about the community disbanding at the end of 2023. Circle of Hope was an Anabaptist community of faith founded in Philadelphia in 1996. It sought to practice an evangelical form of Christianity that cut against the now commonplace political conservatism associated with Evangelicalism.

The community disbanded for a complicated set of reasons, according to Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. Griswold’s work provides a historical overview of the founding of the congregation as well as a comprehensive investigation into the conflict-ridden final years of the church. She did not set out to write about a community that no longer ceases to exist but managed to capture the final years of a church struggling to become more inclusive.

Circle of Hope, like many churches, found the pandemic and subsequent racial unrest fueled by the murder of George Floyd challenging to navigate. As a progressive congregation affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, Circle of Hope navigated questions at the intersection of antiracism, LGBTQ inclusion, and Anabaptist theology across four congregational communities and countless cell groups.

Griswold tells the final years of Circle of Hope’s ministry from the perspective of its four pastors as they struggled to come to a consensus on how best to collectively lead what prior to the pandemic was a roughly 700-person community.

I found the book compelling, insightful, and tragic. During college, I adopted many Anabaptist proclivities following in the vein of Shane Claiborne a founder of the Simple Way. Claiborne attended Circle of Hope for several years. While theological and religious outlook resembles more mainline Christianity today, I found much of Griswold’s work to have application for less evangelical Christian communities.

The Blessing and Curse of Founding Pastors

Founded in 1996, Circle of Hope was the dream of Ron and Gwen White. The Whites were inheritors of the 1960s countercultural Jesus Movement. Unlike the 1980s conservatism of the Moral Majority that has become synonymous with evangelicalism, the Jesus Movement were evangelical hippies. They were antiwar. They were anticapitalist. They fought against poverty.

The Whites sought to establish a Christian community where their children could receive the love, support, and evangelical teachings they believed in so deeply. The community was not uniformly progressive and held many evangelical ideas of sexual purity and abstinence at the same time as they rallied against consumerism.

Under Ron’s leadership, the community grew to around 700 members by 2015. After nearly twenty years of leadership, though, Ron was ready to take a step back. He had helped nurture and encourage a team of pastors to take over primary responsibilities as he phased out of leadership over the next five years. During this time he planned to serve as a “development pastor.”

Of the individuals stepping into Ron’s proverbial shoes, included two women Julie and Rachel, and two men Jonny and Ben. Ben also happened to be Ron’s son.

Ron’s continued leadership and presence in the community became one of the biggest challenges that Circle of Hope confronted in its history. White planted the church and led the church through a period of substantial growth. He was beloved. This made the leadership of Julie, Rachel, Jonny and Ben all the more challenging. Ben in particular struggled to navigate his leadership responsibilities as Ron’s son.

As I have researched and written about in a history of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, NC. White, Progressive, Christian, and Male leaders have difficulty retiring. They have spent their careers leading communities of faith at odds with the prevailing religious culture. In some instances, they have put their lives and careers on the line for these communities. Giving up leadership is difficult.

Perhaps one reason is that finding community in retirement is difficult. Given that many progressive congregations are unique in their local community, progressive pastors do not have a lot of other church options. Even if well-intentioned, their lingering presence becomes a distraction and a challenge for the leaders who succeed them, particularly if they are women or people of color.

Reading about Circle of Hope highlighted the deep need for retiring clergy to find alternative communities of faith to attend once they retire.

The Challenge of Shared Leadership

Much of Griswold’s work takes the perspective of Circle of Hope’s four clergy—Julie, Rachel, Johnny, and Ben. She does not portray any individual as villan or hero, but rather seeks to capture the complexities of their motivations and the difficulties of their desire to move the congregation towards more antiracist organizational principles.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, all four pastors were clear that Circle of Hope needed to prioritize antiracism within their communities. Each pastor, however, had different ideas as to how best to lead Circle of Hope in this moment. Johnny, the only person of color in pastor leadership, experienced this differently from his white co-pastors.

While some members of the congregation make sustained appearances like Bethany, a woman of color who becomes an antiracism consultant for the congregation, most of the conflict centers upon the pastoral leadership. Julie and Johnny are portrayed as the two leaders pushing the swift and drastic change and Rachel and Ben are portrayed as the two leaders committed to slow and marginal change.

Griswold layers the leadership conflict, acknowledging the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are interconnected. At times it is difficult to know whether Circle of Hope leadership was acknowledging the ways in which their conflicts over their approach to antiracism were enmeshed in other systems of oppression.

The leadership focus of the book obscures the importance of congregants who had a variety of opinions and perspectives. While people of color in the congregation were about a 20% minority, they disagreed as to how to approach making Circle of Hope more antiracist. Some supported Johnny and Julie’s approach whereas others had more loyalties to Rachel and Ben.

In many ways, Circle of Hope seemed to highlight how the quest to transform a congregation rooted in racism into an antiracism is not a clear process. There is no uniform or standard process for all churches, and there is no clear point where one knows the transformation is complete. If anything, it is a collaborative process, and if the leadership is unable or unwilling to collaborate, the project seems destined to fail.

The Quest for Perfectionism

Given the high stakes of transforming a church community shaped by racism into an antiracist community, Circle of Hope’s leadership was committed to a form of perfectionism. After all, anything other than perfection would by definition be racism.

Griswold explains that there were conversations both explicit and implicit about splitting the church and allowing Rachel and Ben to leader their two communities and Julie and Johnny to lead their two communities separately. Circle of Hope raised questions of what does it mean for a church to move to quickly? When should religious leaders leave congregants behind?

These questions are messy. For Julie and Johnny there was an imperative to change the church’s culture in order to be a more loving and welcoming place that better reflects the Gospel. For Ben and Rachel there was an imperative to hold the community together to ensure the community could reach its destination together.

Reflecting upon the book after reading, I was reminded of my homiletics professor’s observation that white progressives do not talk about sin enough. White progressive Christians are skilled at talking about justice and God’s inclusive love, but struggle to discuss sin. While many white progressive Christians would acknowledge racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. as sin, there is little conversation about what that means. We cannot read or think our way out of sin. We do not often talk of atonement and when we do we often disagree.

There is an arrogance in our quest for perfection—our desire to get things right. The reality is that we will fail at perfection as Circle of Hope failed.

In the final pages, Griswold explains that one of the four communities of Circle of Hope is still meeting regularly. This time, however, without formal pastoral leadership. They share responsibilities as a congregation, but they continue despite their larger over-arching community disbanding. Christians are prone to failure, but they are also a resurrection people. Churches will fail and leaders certainly will and do. The question should not be will we try again, but how should we try things differently this time? We will fail but will we get up—less arrogant and more humble than the time before.

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