Some thoughts for progressive churches

A guest post for Friday "Fun," 9 May 2024

Hi all, I have had quite the week, driving across Texas visiting loved ones who are seriously ill, and I’m not really feeling very fun or creative today. So just a few items of housekeeping before I turn things over to author

Liz Cooledge Jenkins

, who generously contributed a guest essay with further thoughts on the book Circle of Hope.

We WILL have our delayed May Zebra Dazzle on Tuesday at 8 pm EDT. A link will go out to paid subscribers only sometime before that. If you would like to attend and do not want to become a paid subscriber, please email me at holly_berkley@yahoo.com and I will comp you. *No need to do a mea culpa for not subscribing. Seriously. Just say Comp Me Already and like magic it will happen.

At this point, I would rather you spend any money you may have lying around on preordering my book. Or bribing someone you know to preorder my book. However, if you have already done that and would like to be a paid subscriber:

OK, here’s

Liz Cooledge Jenkins

:

Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church is both a juicy deep dive into all the pastor drama and an artful journalistic unveiling of one church’s struggle to evolve beyond its original state of being.

I loved this book. It hit me in the feels. I found myself wondering, as Holly, Cara, and John suggested toward the end of their lovely conversation about this book, what it could look like to talk about Circle of Hope in our communities, and especially in the progressive faith communities many of us might be exploring or call home.

What might progressive communities learn from Circle of Hope (the church)’s struggles and ultimate implosion? What can we learn about being part of a faith community—and about being in leadership in a faith community—in non-toxic ways? How about white people who, like me, are part of (or hope to be part of) multiracial faith communities—what might we learn?

I’d love to explore some of these questions from a few different angles. I think of these as gracious invitations Circle of Hope (the book) might offer to us and our communities. The details will look different in different contexts; some may apply more than others, or not at all. Most, I hope, invite patient contemplation more than specific, urgent action.

They are things we can wrestle with, talk about, noodle on, circle back to in different seasons. They’re things for progressive communities to consider—things I want to consider as I engage in my community.

Here are five invitations I sense as I reflect on Circle of Hope:

1) Let’s commit to speaking kindly to one another

My soul felt jarred every time the one white man among the four Circle of Hope pastors spoke to the others with carelessness and often-unbridled rage. Which was often.

I know I’m a sensitive soul, and I know we all hold different expectations and unstated norms as to how conflict is expressed and resolved. But I also see how one pastor’s harsh words harmed both individual colleagues and the whole system they were all a part of.

And I wonder: In our own communities, can we commit to speaking kindly? Especially across differences of race, gender, or any other dynamic where a person with more societal power is speaking to one with less?

I’m not interested in trying to tone police people with less power. I am interested in seeing people with more power—the ones who are accustomed to saying whatever they want in whatever way they want, often without even noticing how it might impact others—learn to do better.

In Circle of Hope, the one white male pastor seemed to see his angry outbursts as, yes, inappropriate and non-ideal, but also as a matter only of personal anger management. But it’s not just a personal thing. It’s not only a private sin issue to confess and receive forgiveness for. It’s a matter of how we work in community, across power dynamics of all sorts.

It’s about people with societal power learning to consider how their ways of speaking and being affect those around them. Learning to be held accountable. Learning to be called in, invited into greater care and mutuality.

What a difference it might have made if some of the Circle of Hope leaders learned to take a breath, take a pause, consider carefully what they want to say before they say it. To acknowledge their rage and let it work through their bodies. To examine their anger and see what they might learn from it, rather than taking it out harshly on their colleagues.

Maybe some therapy was in order. Maybe a punching bag, or a sport. Maybe a practice of making art or music or poems with their rage, or journaling about their feelings—processing and releasing their anger in some way that heals their own beings and does not harm others.

I don’t expect perfection here. Of course not. But I do think there’s a commitment we can make to speaking kindly, with intention and care. And to making apologies and repair when we fail to do so.

For the two female pastors in particular, I felt how deeply the harsh words spoken by the two male pastors derailed their ability to serve and minister to their communities well. I could feel how much life their colleagues’ angry, egotistical, untempered energy drained out of them.

I could see how these women’s churches flourished when they were free to pastor in the ways that worked for them, that resonated with their souls and how they’re built. And I could see how they floundered when too much of their energy was sucked into heated internal leadership conflicts instead.

Seeking to become an anti-racist church, as Circle of Hope tried to do, is not for the faint of heart. Conflicts will arise. Tensions are inevitable. But we—and especially white people—can choose to walk in gentleness through it.

2) Let’s dig into the real questions of what it means to be an anti-racist community

Circle of Hope spent several months working with an outside anti-racism consultant, only to have this consultant get so fed up that he chose to stop working with them. Major yikes.

And yet—this could be so many of our churches. The road toward racial justice is a difficult one, and Circle of Hope’s attempt at it raises some questions for anyone on the journey.

I wonder, for example: Is it necessary, as some folks in Circle of Hope insisted, for a community to focus only on becoming anti-racist? I feel skeptical of this. Probably because all the different forms of hierarchy and power differentials and oppression in our world feel so very deeply interconnected. I don’t know that we can really do anti-racist work without simultaneously dealing with our misogyny, our homophobia, our ableism.

I also wonder: If a community does choose to focus on anti-racism for a set time, what happens when that set time is over? How do we keep committing to anti-racism for the long haul? And how do we do this in ways that feel sustainable to everyone involved—especially to people of color, who often end up doing a ton of emotional and cognitive labor in these conversations?

And, relatedly: How do we make room for all voices—especially all voices of color—to be heard? How can we and our communities better recognize that no group—not people of color as a whole, not Black women, not white women, not anyone—is a monolith?

There’s so much diversity of thought and experience within each group. This is beautiful, but can also be difficult—especially when one person or a smaller group of people attempt to speak on behalf of a whole and aren’t willing to hear an experience that differs from theirs.

And finally: How do we make room for white folks to share honestly, while also creating a sense of safety for people of color? This gets pretty gnarly pretty quickly—both in the book and in my experience. But it’s worth thinking through.

These are not easy questions. But I think progressive communities can take them as invitations to run with, challenges to wrestle with, thought-provoking prompts for conversation in their own contexts.

We can’t pretend that antiracist work is going to be easy, and we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that our community is special and different and won’t get mired in these tensions like other communities do.

3) Let’s be careful about thinking we’re the good (white) people

Can I just say, as a white person, that this is so, so tempting. It feels really good when a friend who’s a person of color tells me I’m not like other white people, the ones they feel frustrated with.

But I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking I’m one of the good ones and therefore have nothing to learn. I have so much to learn.

I saw this dynamic at work in many of the white folks at Circle of Hope. People of color suggest that being part of this mostly-white church has not always been easy for them. Many white people respond immediately: What?? Surely there’s no racism here! We’re the good ones!

And all further productive conversation gets derailed from that point on. The self-proclaimed good white folks’ defensiveness stifles any chance for healing and anti-racist growth as a community.

I was morbidly fascinated to watch as Circle of Hope, a church that was so progressive around issues of war and peace and economic justice—whose people lived simply, tried hard to work for the good of their broader communities, and protested US militarism and violence—proved unable to have authentic, safe, life-giving, change-making conversations around racial equity.

Many people of color in the congregation did not feel safe sharing their experiences of racialized aggression within the community. Probably because many white people never quite got to the point where they could listen well without adding further trauma.

Fellow white folks—let’s learn to listen without defensiveness. Let’s release our need to believe we’re getting things right. Let’s never think we’re done learning.

Let’s recognize that sometimes we can have really good intentions and still cause harm. And let’s receive it as a gift if someone’s willing to take the risk to tell us that and give us a chance to seek repair and do better.

4) Let’s make peace with letting go

The anti-racist journey was a huge part of Circle of Hope’s story, but the church’s struggles also raise other questions about leadership in general.

I found myself recalling a seminary class I took on 1 Corinthians, a biblical book in which the apostle Paul has a million strong opinions that he doesn’t hesitate to share with a church he founded and then moved on from. In theory he entrusted this church to local leaders. But in practice he just can’t let it go.

I remember thinking, Wait a minute. I founded a Christian fellowship group once, through the church I was working for at the time. And then I couldn’t work for that church anymore, so other people took up the group’s leadership when I left. I stay in touch with individuals I have relationships with, but it would never occur to me to write to the whole community and try to tell them what to do. That would be wildly inappropriate. What is Paul doing?

We’ll let that question sit. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be answered, at least not right now.

But I thought about this as I read Circle of Hope. Because one of the original founders of the church was perhaps a bit like Paul. He retired, officially, but he couldn’t stay out of things. He kept exercising his influence in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and this was one of the issues that kept tearing the church and its four pastors apart.

Things would have been so much easier at Circle of Hope if the founding pastor had stepped back and let the four newer pastors lead freely.

I don’t think he intended harm. But perhaps sometimes people have more influence than they think they do. A former leader thinks he’s offering helpful wisdom, but the recipients of this wisdom think he’s trying to pull the strings. Influence comes in many forms.

Sometimes what was right for a community during one era isn’t right forever. New leaders can see this and make change where needed—and they need to feel free to do so. Or sometimes a community was missing something all along, like what Circle of Hope was missing when it came to more fully becoming an anti-racist community. New leaders can help fill in some of the gaps, right some of the wrongs, take a community in new directions it’s needed to go in for a long time.

I can see how change might be hard to watch, if you’re the OG leader. But it’s all good. It’s all part of how communities evolve and adapt and survive together. It’s something that leaders can embrace rather than fight, feel offended by, or get defensive about.

5) Let’s consider asking, “How is it with your soul?”

For all of Circle of Hope’s issues, there were certainly some good things, too. One thing I really liked was that they started small group meetings and pastors’ meetings alike with one simple question: How is it with your soul?

For the four pastors at Circle of Hope, this question gave them the opportunity to open up to each other. One pastor in particular—one of the women—took it as a chance to share how she was feeling about another pastor’s (jarringly harsh) words without returning that harshness.

I think this question can open space for conversations about our experiences and feelings, the kinds of conversations that are perhaps less likely to devolve into yelling at each other. It opens up the chance for each person to be as vulnerable (or not) as we choose to be.

How is it with your soul? is no casual question. But in the right context—with relationships, with emotional safety, with people committed to listening carefully and speaking kindly and honestly to one another—I think it’s a beautiful one. It invites each person in a group to share something meaningful to them, and to be heard with care.

I’m not saying this question is right for every situation. But are there spaces in our communities where it might be a life-giving one? Something to consider.

I hope some of these invitations spark something in you as you think about the communities you’re a part of. What a book. What a journey—and what a journey all of us are on in our own ways. Let’s keep wrestling with the real questions together.