Beautiful sad book

I've been a fan of Eliza Griswold since the first book of hers that I met, a travelogue along the parallel in Africa where Muslim and Christian worlds overlapped. I fell rather in love with her writing and was delighted to see her again, and to learn she'd won a Pulizer prize in the years since, no doubt deserved. I had to think for less than two seconds before buying this book.

Circle of Hope is a piece of immersive journalism about four pastors who jointly led a multi -congregational church of the same name.

Eliza Griswold delves into this progressive evangelical outfit with a delicate, watchmaker's precision, helped both by the generosity of the pastors, and by the churches' incontinent, and honestly rather navel-gazing, habit of airing all its thoughts to the entire church on every type of social media. The result is a kind of MRI scan of the church's innards. It's beautiful and elegantly done. One wonders, despite all the care she took to write it, what damage it has done to the church: so easy to dismantle that which we love.

But seeing this finely composed scrutiny gives us all the chance to think our own thoughts about this sputtering candle of a church (as are all churches, of course). Anabaptists bash each other with pillows, and grace, but still get battered. At times the church seemed almost to veer towards a kind of cultural revolution over the Black Lives Matter movement: counter-revolutionaries were obliged to make lengthy confessions of their faults; people of colour who disagreed with the prevailing narrative were not given their due weight. The church's dogged progressivism weighed on it: everyone had therapists. They called in an outside expert to examine their attitudes (spoiler: much churning and then he collects his fees and resigns). I wonder if Jesus stopped being at the centre of the Circle of Hope at times and other good things took his place.

Lovely book, thoughtfully read with just a few slips. Keep writing, Eliza. But I (a white churchgoer in another country) found it sad and poignant because of the story it told.

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