Why Did This Progressive Evangelical Church Fall Apart?

It’s hard to hear the word of the Lord on Facebook Live. Of all the challenges my family faced in 2020—and there were many—online church was one of the worst. Corralling my children (then 4 and 9) to focus on my small laptop instead of their Legos could be more difficult than Zoom school or Zoom work or keeping enough hand sanitizer in the house. The parish priests did their best to guide us virtually, but it felt like a hollow simulacrum of a service, missing all the parts that had, however briefly, held my kids’ attention: no babies to wave at, no friends to hug, no tacos.

As Eliza Griswold reports in her new book, Circle of Hope, amid the mounting crises of the coronavirus pandemic, churches around the country struggled to maintain a sense of normalcy. If so much of church is about being united, how can it function when people are apart? I was struck by something Julie Hoke, a pastor in Philadelphia, says at one point in the book. After leading a disappointing, disjointed Easter service in 2021, during which participants met outside and masked, muffling the sound of their voices, she laments: “We can’t hear each other singing.”

She meant it literally, but it’s also a metaphor for broader difficulties her church encountered. Pastor Julie’s group was one of four linked evangelical congregations, collectively known as Circle of Hope, based in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Griswold, who embedded with the Church from 2019 to 2023, shows how, under the stress of COVID and the national racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, members of this community became unable to hear one another. Or maybe they had never been as good at listening as they thought.

The forces that pulled Circle of Hope apart extend far beyond one church or pandemic. We live in a strange moment when religion remains a powerful force in American public life even as churchgoing declines precipitously. Although 68 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians, only 45 percent are members of a church, compared with 70 percent at the turn of the 21st century. Laws such as the one Louisiana passed earlier this year requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools could be seen as signs of mainstream Christianity’s strength, but they could also be an admission of its weakness, a last-ditch attempt to get the government to do the work once accomplished by Sunday school.

Griswold shows the unique value of church membership: how it can unite people across differences to pursue a common moral and spiritual goal. In an era when meals, clothes, romantic partners, and political ideas can be micro-targeted to us by algorithms, there’s a lot to be said for the friction of a messy, in-person community. But maintaining such a community is never easy—especially now. Churches can be a refuge from modern life, but they can’t be completely siloed from it. The differences between Circle of Hope’s members were often political or interpersonal, rather than theological, and exacerbated by social media and the limits of Zoom. Everyone believed in virtue, but they lacked a common vision of how to achieve it and, in some cases, even a common vocabulary for having the conversation.

Circle, as its members called it, was by no means a typical American church. But, as we see through Griswold’s reporting, its fracturing becomes a painful case study in the ways the events of the past four years have exposed the failings of our institutions, without pointing a way forward.  

Circle was founded in Philadelphia in the 1990s by Rod and Gwen White, a married couple. The Whites were Californians who had been part of the evangelical “Jesus freak” movement of the ’70s: Young hippies, inspired in part by the evangelist Billy Graham, found Christ and sought to live by his teachings. By 2019, when Griswold embedded with them, Circle was an urban congregation that seemed to fly in the face of stereotype. Anti-war and pro-immigrant, so committed to nonviolence that they literally melted AK-47s into garden tools, the congregants offered Griswold a hands-on, “punk rock” model of evangelical Christianity. As she writes in an introductory note, “This bright and funny band of Jesus followers served as a microcosm of the radical evangelical movement, which, in its real-life application, promised not only to reclaim the moral heart of evangelicalism but also to serve as Christianity’s last, best shot at remaining relevant.”

[Read: Where did evangelicals go wrong?]

Griswold, whose father was a bishop in the Episcopal Church, was curious about how Circle might provide a model for other evangelical congregations, many of which had been subsumed by Trumpism. She hoped to attend services and pastors’ meetings, but her plans were blown up by the pandemic. So when church became virtual, Griswold adapted—going to outdoor services, sitting around firepits, and attending more than 1,000 hours of Zoom gatherings.

By early 2020, the Whites had handed Circle over to the next generation: Ben White (son of Rod and Gwen), Rachel Sensenig, Jonny Rashid, and Julie Hoke, all pastoring different communities in Philadelphia and New Jersey with different needs. When COVID hit, the pastors decided to co-lead virtual services, preaching together to a combined congregation of all four churches.

Circle was established as part of the Anabaptist denomination Brethren in Christ, whose adherents have a history of social engagement but whose politics don’t map neatly onto conventional, contemporary divides. The Brethren in Christ, for instance, oppose all wars but also reject gay marriage. Under the Whites’ leadership, LGBTQ congregants were not shunned, but neither were they able to wed within the Church. Circle also had a stated commitment to anti-racism, but maintained an overwhelmingly white congregation even in majority-Black neighborhoods. Griswold talks with members who left before 2020 because they felt out of place as gay or Black—but she also finds plenty of other members who felt they could overlook these contradictions. Until they couldn’t.

The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 spurred the Church, for the first time, to seriously examine its record on racial issues: its lack of diversity, the fact that four Black pastors who had been hired over the past few decades had all quit (though Griswold notes that the White family still socialized with some of them), and the insensitivity that members of color reported experiencing. Circle’s leaders decided to explore these problems as a community, with the help of Nelson Hewitt, a DEI consultant and former pastor whom they hired to direct them. The zeal for this experiment quickly soured as Hewitt encountered obstacle after obstacle: Pastors ignored his guidelines for Zoom conversations; some members were defensive or obstructive. After three months of tense sessions, marred by misunderstandings and mistrust, Hewitt quit. Things went downhill from there.

If the Circle of Hope had been more diverse to begin with, perhaps it might have had an existing community of Black members and leaders to guide the conversation. Instead, Ben, Rachel, and Julie—who are all white—and Jonny, who is Egyptian American, were left to navigate new waters together, without a clear map or shared vision. (They did elevate one Black Circle member, Bethany Stewart, to take on Hewitt’s role, but ignored many of her suggestions.) Ben, skeptical of politics, believed that there should be some separation between “the life of faith and the faith of social justice.” Rachel, who seemed uncomfortable at the tensions these conversations raised, often went silent. Julie embraced the new mission eagerly, but her methods led one Black congregant to feel that she was “‘whitesplaining’ to him, as a Black man, what racism was.” Jonny, meanwhile, didn’t always seem to register the gravity of the confrontations. After a discussion that began with a reminder to “believe and to defer to the voices and the feelings of BIPOC members” ended with some members in tears, Jonny left Bethany with the impression, she said, that he’d had “fun.”

The spectacle of people alienating their Black colleagues through jargon and condescension in the name of anti-racism is not limited to this Church, or churches in general. Across the country in the months following Floyd’s murder, many institutions experienced the same fervent longing to improve, along with the same tragic inability to do so in meaningful ways. But the book’s careful, unsparing catalog of Circle’s failures is particularly painful to read, because a church isn’t a school or a company or an arts nonprofit. As Andrew Yang, a musician and an attorney who was a Circle member, put it to Griswold in 2023, church is “supposed to be something different.” The members of Circle seem to have done a better job of following Jesus’s directive to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend to the sick, and visit the imprisoned than many others, and yet they could barely get through a Zoom session without erupting into recriminations.

Circle of Hope closed in January of this year. Like many churches, it saw declining membership during the pandemic. But money problems also contributed to the organization’s downfall. As part of their quest to live more consistently with their progressive values, the pastors decided to leave the Brethren in Christ over the issue of marriage equality and fully affirm LGBTQ members. This choice led to a complicated financial and real-estate settlement that left the Church with far less property and cash. Low on people, funds, and places to worship, the Church dissolved.

[Read: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]

One might reasonably ask, “So what?” In 21st-century America, if people want to practice their Christian faith, there are many ways to do so without needing to meet at a particular place or time with other people to worship. But the end of a church might have a real social cost, according to the political scientist Ryan Burge, who is one of the nation’s preeminent chroniclers of the decline in American churchgoing. Burge’s studies of religious Americans have led him to one conclusion: “When it comes to religion, guess who are the least tolerant? Those who believe the Bible is literally true. Guess who are the most tolerant? Those who attend religious services at least once a week.” His data show that although religious belief can encourage narrow-mindedness, the sheer act of sitting next to others in pews, week after week, rain or shine, makes people more inclined to cut their fellow citizens a little slack.

Yet Circle of Hope demonstrates that simply going to church won’t make us all get along. Deep divisions and injustices can sometimes be papered over through charismatic leadership, but not forever. Maybe if they weren’t held over Zoom, Circle’s anti-racism chats wouldn’t have been so obtuse. Maybe without social media amplifying jargon and prompting misunderstandings, pastors could have been more effective shepherds. But we can’t be sure.

I do know that I can’t celebrate Circle’s collapse. Because in addition to highlighting the challenges and frustrations of trying to live a religious life, Circle of Hope demonstrates what church can provide. In one harrowing scene that Griswold observed, Pastor Rachel drives one of her congregants to the emergency room, where he hopes to seek treatment for his drug addiction.  She tends to his spirit, praying with him, while also making sure that he gets the medical attention he needs. It would be absurd to say that only churchgoers can be kind, but being placed in a web of mutual obligation creates the conditions under which kindness is easier to perform, or perhaps simply harder to avoid.

Now that my church is back to meeting in person, it’s easier for me to sign my kids up for service projects, to donate money for needed groceries, to check in on how someone’s chemotherapy went. This is what church, at its best, can do. This is what Circle, at its best, did.  

As Andrew, the former Circle member, says, “We made music together and we supported each other’s lives and businesses and family lives … The dream of committing to that kind of mutual life in mutual love because we love Jesus together, I don’t think I can let that go until I’m the only one left.”

When Griswold leaves Andrew, he’s trying to keep some form of Pastor Jonny’s community alive, with a rotating cast of members serving as its leaders. The group is diminishing, though, and it’s not clear how long it will last. Perhaps today, Andrew and that small group are still meeting. Perhaps he has found another evangelical church with similar values. Or maybe, like so many others, he has quit church altogether and now has more time on Sunday for the farmer’s market. As for Circle of Hope, its members are no longer singing in masks, muffled and imperfect; they have gone silent.