What Churches Lose When They Fight like the World Fights
A journalist counts the cost of prolonged cultural conflict in the life of one fractured congregation.
By now, you’ve seen the statistics. In the United States, churches are shrinking. Christian belief is waning. “Nones” comprise a greater share of the population than Protestants or Catholics. And the trendlines don’t look good.
By now, you’ve also seen the explanations—many of them published in the pages of Christianity Today. Leadership crises, denominational tussles, and sexual-abuse scandals have depleted the trust congregants have in their pastors. Congregations have split over political candidates and masks and vaccines and critical race theory and LGBTQ inclusion and women in leadership.
These explanations are right. But to me at least, they increasingly feel like a set of abstractions. They’ve been repeated so many times over the past several years as to have lost their meaning—so rote, by now, as to obscure particularities.
In her new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eliza Griswold offers no such obfuscation. Through painstaking observation of one church over many years—Circle of Hope, a progressive evangelical community with “cells” across New Jersey and Pennsylvania—she reveals how the histories, gifts, and besetting sins of particular Christians in specific circumstances react to monolithic cultural pressures. Through her reporting—rigorous, expertly paced, never polemical—she also reveals what’s at stake.
Utter estrangement
Circle of Hope was founded in 1996 by former Jesus Freaks Rod and Gwen White. From the very beginning, the Anabaptist congregation ran counter to the predominant political and cultural conservatism of the Religious ...