1BEN
“Blessed are the peacemakers.”
—MATTHEW 5:9
Ben White surveyed the darkened strip malls of southern New Jersey through the windshield of his ten-year-old red Prius. Up and down Route 130, scant light shone from the chain stores managing to stay afloat, mostly chicken joints and Family Dollar stores. Many of these strip malls were teetering toward bankruptcy. The post-industrial wasteland of 2020 depressed Ben, who’d been leading Circle of Hope’s New Jersey outpost since 2015. Devoting themselves to following Jesus and stripping away the evils of American capitalism, church members called South Jersey “the ruins of empire.” Ben hadn’t been thrilled to pastor here. He’d wanted to travel afar for the Lord, as an explorer of both interior and exterior landscapes. The belly of his right calf bore a blue tattoo of Reepicheep, a mouse in C. S. Lewis’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, with a line of lullaby that Reepicheep’s mother sings to him: There is the utter east—a call Ben heard to “the undiscovered places of the soul.”
Still, Ben had thrown himself into bringing young people into the New Jersey Circle. Cultivating a skater-pastor vibe, the six-foot-four pastor adopted Vans, a hoodie, and a flat-brimmed baseball cap, and struck up a partnership with Kids Alley, a local children’s ministry evangelizing out of a van. On Friday nights, he took a small group of teenagers out for pizza. He talked to them about Jesus and personal debt. Inspired by a local evangelist, he trawled a local community college campus, holding up a sign that read, TELL ME YOUR STORY. He was kicked off that campus for proselytizing, so Ben enrolled as a student and redoubled his efforts, inviting people to his church, which occupied a repurposed firehouse along Marlton Pike, a major South Jersey throughway.
The squat yellow building, with four garage doors for long-gone fire engines, came strapped with a $1,200-a-month mortgage, a significant sum for its congregation of one hundred working people. Marlton Pike was the most politically mixed of Circle of Hope’s four congregations. Unlike Fishtown, where Jonny Rashid’s intellectual band met in a former dentist’s office, or Germantown, where Julie Hoke’s progressive professionals rented space on Sundays in a Presbyterian church, South Jersey, politically, was bright purple with pockets of red. A handful of people in Ben’s congregation loaded pallets in Amazon warehouses and listened to Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and critic of political correctness. Some had voted for Trump, whom Ben loathed.
But Ben viewed his family’s church as beyond politics. In their effort to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, worldly identities, such as conservative and liberal, didn’t apply. Circle’s radical vision transcended all such markers. In an increasingly fractured world, this aspiration toward unity was a thrilling ideal, and for Ben, it was possible only through Jesus.
Calling himself “evangelical with a lowercase e,” Ben believed there was one path to salvation. “If it ain’t Jesus, it won’t save you,” as he put it. To him, Circle’s mission was clear: “Bringing people to Jesus is our primary goal.” Ben also believed in a total commitment to peace. He was an Anabaptist, a member of a five-hundred-year-old Protestant sect to which some two million Christians worldwide belong, including those at Circle of Hope. Anabaptism had, from the start, called for reform. It was born out of the Radical Reformation, a reaction against the corruption of the Catholic Church. Anabaptists insisted only adults could be baptized: those who could make a conscious decision to follow the Lord and demonstrate their commitment to “non-conformity with the world.” For this, thousands were persecuted and put to death during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Anabaptists called execution by drowning “the Third Baptism.”
For Ben, as for his parents, there was a clear distinction between the radical social reordering Jesus commanded and secular politics. Political protests, including those for the progressive causes Ben agreed with, could get in the way of following Jesus. “‘Social justice church’ is a brand I’ve always had misgivings about,” Ben said one afternoon in early 2020. He was taking a break from weed-whacking around the firehouse church. Over two dozen years, he’d watched so many fellow Jesus followers drift away from Circle of Hope when their commitment to a cause competed with their commitment to Jesus.
“There’s a Venn diagram of the life of faith and the faith of social justice,” Ben added. “They’re the same until they’re different.” Herein lay the conundrum. At Circle of Hope, building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth required addressing the world’s woes. Being in the world but not of it, as the Bible commanded, meant striking a difficult balance between separateness and engagement. Anabaptists didn’t retreat from the world, Ben argued—they showed up at their warehouse jobs at Amazon, Foot Locker, and Nabisco, and served as living examples of Jesus’s love. “We’re invasive separatists,” Ben said. “We’re different, in-your-face.” Referring to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he said that Anabaptists were called to “shine like lights in a crooked and corrupt generation.”
* * *
Ben had always wanted to be a pastor. His mom, Gwen, liked to tell the story of her four-year-old son climbing onto a stool to preach his first babbling sermon at the music stand his father used as a lectern. Unlike the vast number of pastor’s kids who resented the strictures of childhood church, Ben relished the shirtless freedom of growing up among Jesus freaks, who established some six hundred peace communes across the United States in the 1970s and ’80s as part of the larger Jesus movement. “The counterculture got saved, and they brought their weirdness to Christianity,” Ben said. “It was an awakening, a real revival, even if it was a revival for white hippies.”
Both Rod and Gwen grew up in 1950s Southern California families who weren’t particularly visionary or spiritual. Rod’s parents didn’t go to church but dropped him off with his sister at a local Baptist congregation for Sunday school, where Rod recalled first feeling the overwhelming presence of Jesus when he was five. Committed to church from then on, he began to catch rides with a kindly elderly lady in her Cadillac. Gwen was sixteen when she first attended Young Life, an evangelical organization that ran youth clubs, sing-alongs, and cookouts around the United States to encourage teens like Gwen to find and follow Jesus. Young Life had its own peer strategy.
“Go find the quarterback, the popular kid,” as Gwen put it. “Try to convert that kid. They’ll bring a ton of kids along.” One afternoon, she joined such a throng outside an overflowing municipal building in Riverside. Standing on tiptoe, she peeked into a window. “On that lawn, I heard that Jesus loved me, and I had never heard that anyone loved me,” she said.
Young Life was part of “the new evangelical movement,” an ambitious twentieth-century push to reach America with the gospel. Billy Graham, known as “the Protestant pope,” feared that Christianity was losing its influence in the United States. He and other evangelical pastors called for a new era of engagement: a revival. Graham’s crusades—evangelistic campaigns that were held at stadiums and other large venues and featured both preaching and music—called people forward to give their lives to Christ; attendees included the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the budding theologian Elaine Pagels. The reach of Graham and other “new evangelicals” would alter American culture and politics. (Graham advised every U.S. president from Truman to Obama.) The new evangelicals created powerful organizations and media outlets, including the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today, along with Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which Rod attended, and Young Life, the youth organization where Gwen found Jesus.
Gwen’s conversion experience on the municipal lawn in Riverside, California, transformed every aspect of a childhood marked by loneliness and disappointment. “Coming to Christ blew the doors off my life,” Gwen said. A powerful swimmer, she’d missed the 1968 Olympic trials by one one-hundredth of a second. The urgency of sharing her absolute faith in Jesus transformed Gwen’s despair into love. She marched against Vietnam and volunteered at a health clinic with Spanish-speaking patients. From a distance, with her cutoff dungarees and sun-bleached hair, she might’ve appeared as any hippie activist, but Gwen’s purpose was spiritual, not political, which she felt was very different. By the early 1970s, college campuses were awash with Jesus freaks, many of whom, including Rod and Gwen, looked like free-love radicals but were in fact enacting what they believed to be an ancient form of rebellion. “We rarely got sucked into the social left,” Gwen said. “Because we always wanted to be about Jesus.”
When Rod and Gwen met at a Jesus event in 1974 as undergraduates at the University of California, Riverside, Rod invited Gwen to a Bible study in his apartment. Within fifteen minutes, Gwen grew enamored by the ethereal young man with flowing hair and an oversized wooden cross slung around his delicate neck. The next week, she brought homemade cookies. Listening to Rod spin his “grandiose plans to change the fabric of the church,” Gwen fell hard. Rod saw evangelization as “just like a sport.” He believed the world was due for a new revival, which he would help lead. To prepare, he studied the First Great Awakening, the eighteenth-century evangelical movement that swept the American colonies. He wrote his thesis on one of its leaders, George Whitefield, a fiery Anglican orator. Meanwhile, Rod’s Bible study grew so popular that he and his roommates rented a neighboring apartment to accommodate a startling crowd of one hundred students, with Gwen at its center as an eloquent and eager participant.
Falling in love with each other and with Jesus, the two drove around Riverside. When they spotted Christian fish stickers on other beat-up cars, Rod and Gwen held up their right index fingers, the Jesus freak code that Christ was the “one way” to peace. This was the message of exclusive salvation—that only through Jesus could anyone reach heaven—which Billy Graham and the new evangelicals championed. Graham embraced the Jesus freaks, and they loved Graham. When Graham served as grand marshal of the Rose Parade, beaming Jesus freaks raised their index fingers as his float glided past.
* * *
The 1980s marked a sea change in the image of American evangelicals. With the election of Ronald Reagan, an outspoken Republican, the roomier, soft-spoken evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter faded from view. Over the next forty years, as the term “evangelical” grew more aligned with the Republican Party, the values the Whites lived by came to represent a powerful fracture within the larger faith. Rod called Reagan “the devil,” and he believed that Reagan could be the Antichrist, come to signal the Apocalypse. “This could literally be the end-times,” Rod said. It wasn’t Reagan’s conservatism they reacted against; it was his embrace of capitalism in the name of Christianity. “It’s the worst capitalist takeover of the system, and he’s preaching it like it’s gospel,” Rod said. To Rod, this was idolatry: “Nancy was doing his horoscope, while he’s trying to be a Christian.”
For Rod and Gwen, battling the forces of evil didn’t mean simply backing progressive political causes. Jesus was calling for a far more radical transformation of society. “Jesus didn’t come to earth to dismantle the Roman Empire,” Gwen liked to say. “He came to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”
This desire to transcend worldly politics was inspiring but complicated. Although Jesus freaks reflected hippie counterculture, they were also the spiritual children of the new evangelicals, which was, at its core, a fundamentalist movement upholding traditional social values and gender roles. Gwen was as gifted a preacher as Rod. However, as a woman, she was discouraged from preaching and teaching theology at Young Life. Instead, when Gwen married Rod, she taught public school to pay Rod’s way through Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. After he graduated, he became a youth pastor at a Baptist church in Riverside, a city of 170,000 about fifty miles east of Los Angeles. Gwen helped him grow the youth group from a handful of kids to over one hundred. Despite Gwen’s prodigious gifts with pastoring teens, the head pastor ignored her. He preached from the pulpit about a woman’s submission.
“This isn’t Jesus,” Gwen raged to herself and to Rod. Jesus was love, liberation, and freedom—not female servitude. So they started their own Christ-centered commune. In 1979, Rod and Gwen purchased the Flintstone House, their name for the gloppy brown ranch they bought, with a loan from Gwen’s dad, for less than $100,000. (Although Gwen didn’t know it until her dad died, she was a soda-bottle heiress; her family had made a small fortune selling their glass bottle company to a large corporation.) On their commune, Rod, then twenty-five, became the visionary leader. Gwen, a year older, organized volleyball matches and swam in their black-bottomed pool, where, over the next several years, Rod also baptized the two dozen members of the radical community they named the Sierra Street Household.
Living according to the Bible’s book of Acts and its account of Jesus’s early followers, who renounced their worldly possessions to rid themselves of ties to the Roman Empire, Rod dispensed the salary he received as a youth pastor into a common purse, and Gwen cooked communal dinners called Love Feasts, which the Bible refers to (in Jude 1:12) as meals that Jesus’s disciples shared with one another. Each year on April 1, they reviewed the principles that bound them to one another and to God and posted them on the fridge.
Many other Jesus communes had no affiliation with a church, but Rod was attracted to the idea of radical reform and wanted to be part of a larger collective, so he ordered a directory of Anabaptist churches and organizations in Southern California and wrote to several. A bishop with the Brethren in Christ (BIC), a denomination of some twenty thousand people that was founded in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and is one of the oldest in the United States, wrote back.
“Before too long, we had the bishop in our living room,” Rod said. Observing their statement of formation, their Love Feasts, and their common purse firsthand, the bishop noted to Rod that the Sierra Street Household reminded him of the book of Acts. Rod and Gwen were tickled. The Baptist church where Rod had been serving as youth pastor had told them these same practices were communism. So the Sierra Street Household joined the BIC.
Some of their efforts to follow Scripture were wonderfully zany. To wrest the death and resurrection of Jesus away from both pagan fertility rituals and Hallmark, they outlawed Easter egg hunts. Gwen, who’d given birth to four rambunctious boys in four years, gathered three-year-old Ben and his fraternal twin, Joel; sensitive Luke, five; and Jacob, who at six was already their sharp-eyed leader. She smashed chocolate Easter bunnies with a meat tenderizer and ripped the heads off marshmallow Peeps, while the boys gleefully gobbled the ruined remnants of consumer culture. She also revived a medieval Christian tradition of baking hot cross buns for Easter sunrise, which they tore to represent the breaking of the cross and Jesus’s victory over death.
Life on the commune, however, wasn’t all swimming and smashing hollow chocolate bunnies. For Gwen, some aspects of building a Jesus-centered utopia proved harder. By the late 1980s, Gwen, who did most of the cooking and caring for people as a spiritual mother, was desperate for a change. Rod asked the Sierra Street Household members for permission to draw on the common purse to take Gwen to Palm Springs, where the Whites set a different course for their marriage and mission. God was calling them on a new adventure. Ben was eight years old when the Whites announced they were quitting communal life in California. Their departure signaled the end of blissful formative years spent tooling around the neighborhood on bikes with his three tow-headed brothers. For Ben, leaving the freedoms of Southern California would always mark an exit from paradise.
* * *
In 1991, the Whites headed east to Waynesboro, a former factory town in Central Pennsylvania two miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the Brethren in Christ needed a pastor for a 175-year-old church. For the next four years, the Whites were content, although sometimes, given their SoCal Jesus-freak ways, Rod and Gwen chafed against the culture. America was ascendant. Wall Street and Gordon Gekko were hot; Hair and hippies were not. Jesus freaks had vanished from the public eye. Locals noted when Rod made the mistake of unwittingly mowing his lawn on a Sunday, the day of rest, wearing only shorts. They were also slightly scandalized when Gwen drove alone to Washington, D.C.
The Whites’ eldest, Jacob, turning thirteen, refused to join the Boys’ Brigade, the Christian version of the Boy Scouts; during church, he parsed Rod’s sermons, scribbling close readings and and handing them down the pew to a highly intelligent girl his age named Aubrey, whom he would eventually marry. Ben didn’t like Waynesboro much; he, too, bumped up against its senseless regulations, including enforcements against jaywalking even when no cars were around.
Within several years, Rod and Gwen were ready to move on from Central Pennsylvania. The American church was in the throes of a crisis—“a mass exodus of eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds,” as Gwen put it. Anabaptists, like most Protestants, were scrambling to fill their pews, which had been emptying since the 1950s. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the BIC began to abandon its foundational ideal of rejecting the world. To survive, they needed more people, and they were in cities. Ever since Anabaptism had arrived in North America during the 1600s with European settlers, it had remained largely rural, with the exception of service workers, who, fulfilling Jesus’s call in the Sermon on the Mount, traveled to cities to work among the poor. Yet, by the nineties, urban decay had exposed the underbelly of American capitalism. God’s people were suffering from the disease of poverty. This call to save the cities coincided with a new call to save the church. Rod and Gwen were determined to do both. They would “build the church for the next generation.”
At a 1994 BIC conference, the Whites leapt at the chance to plant a church in a city outside of the United States. They explored options in Kingston, Jamaica; Lagos, Nigeria; and Durban, South Africa. But Jacob, sixteen, the outspoken critic, refused to leave the country, so the Whites explored options closer to home in the Bronx and Philadelphia. Once Gwen determined that public schools were abysmal in the Bronx, the Whites drove three hours from Waynesboro to check out Philadelphia, one of the most racially divided and poorest cities in America.
Heading east along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Rod and Gwen traded names for their new church. They avoided “church” so as not to scare away the very young people they wanted to attract. Gwen landed first on the word “hope.” If other churches were offering “shame,” then they’d do the opposite. “Hope was the missing ingredient,” Gwen said. Then “circle” arrived on her tongue. “It’s a Circle of Hope. That’s what we want to offer. That’s what we think God wants to offer the world.”
* * *
The Whites chose Philadelphia, and, in 1995, as they settled in, Rod set about wandering the aisles of Tower Records, striking up conversations. By a rack of local publications, he spotted a zine about Christian music, tracked down its creators at nearby Drexel University, and invited them to check out his and Gwen’s very different vision of church. For too long, American churches had been hotbeds of hypocrisy and abuse, Rod wrote in a self-published volume, A Circle of Hope: Jesus at Work Among the Next Generation of the Church. “People,” he continued, “have been dominated, abused, bamboozled, threatened and diminished in church for ages.” Winning them back was a competitive business: “We are determined to give them a chance to meet Jesus before some other ‘missionary’ wins them to the other ‘gospels’ hunting them down.”
The Whites’ effort benefited from a spirit already afoot in Philadelphia, where the nascent movement born of the Jesus freaks and galvanized in reaction against the religious right thrived. Philadelphia’s self-described radical evangelicals, who’d started a magazine called The Other Side, were holding conferences and organizing rallies and concerts reminiscent of the Jesus freaks. The Jesus movement had once numbered in the millions, but many had fallen away and no one knew how many like-minded believers were affiliated with this band of boomers, Gen Xers, and, soon, disaffected millennials confronting the world’s inequities in the streets of their cities and on their computer screens.
The same year the Whites began to plant Circle of Hope, Philadelphia’s radical evangelical leaders helped launch the Call to Renewal, a nationwide revival targeting American cities. Tony Campolo, a pastor and sociologist at Eastern University, and Ronald Sider, who taught at Messiah University’s Philadelphia campus and authored Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which sold 400,000 copies and was published in nine languages, joined Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners magazine, in rallying young Christians to engage in social justice.
The Call to Renewal, however, wasn’t about planting churches. It marked a deliberate effort to contest the growing influence of the religious right among young people by bringing students to postindustrial cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to live and work communally on economic, racial, and environmental injustice. Mission Year, which began in 1999 as part of this reawakening, funneled more than 1,200 young evangelicals from around America to underserved neighborhoods in cities, exposing them to the realities of poverty and solidarity as part of fulfilling Jesus’s commandments “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mission Year was a lived experiment, a Real World for young Christians, that led many to shed their parents’ politics and commit their lives to justice. Many took up urban farming. By the early 2000s, more than one thousand vacant lots in Philadelphia were transformed into vegetable and flower gardens.
* * *
In the Philadelphia neighborhood known as Center City, Rod rented a raw space at Tenth and Locust. Outside, a large green sign read UNITED FOOD MARKET. Inside, on the second floor, Rod established Circle of Hope’s first “rebel outpost,” as he called it; the cavernous space was almost deliberately ugly, its plainness a poke in the eye to the pomp of megachurches, and a reminder that a church was about not a building, but people. One of Circle’s core teachings held, “The church is not a ‘thing’ that does things; it is not a building. We are the church and we support one another as Jesus expresses himself through us.”
In 1996, on Palm Sunday, Rod led Circle’s first official worship meeting with some fifty young people, Gwen, and their four boys. Instead of high-production-value lighting and flat-screen TVs, the meeting consisted simply of Rod, in jeans, speaking at the music stand he’d adopted as his lectern. He didn’t use the word “sermon,” which implied a formality and preachiness he avoided. Instead, he invited questions and comments, which he called talkback. He welcomed disruption, provocative thinking, and participation. This informal call-and-response was designed to break down hierarchy. Worship wasn’t a presentation; it was an experience. For the Whites, the purpose of church was to build a beloved community of those who might disagree about all kinds of particularities but who shared a desire to worship the Lord together and to live according to the tenets of Scripture. Within nine months, they’d grown to a group of one hundred souls climbing the wooden stairs to worship on Sundays.
This flourishing was no accident. It was part of a deliberate strategy developed by the church growth movement, whose tactics Rod had studied at Fuller. Blending corporate marketing with evangelizing, the church growth movement taught young pastors and missionaries how to plant churches as if they were businesses. This spurred a lucrative network of conferences and books, and led to the founding of megachurches and the rise of celebrity pastors, including Rick Warren, founder of the Saddleback Church; John Wimber, a founding leader of the Vineyard Movement; and Bill Hybels, founder of Willow Creek Community Church. Pastors became entrepreneurs, implementing church growth movement strategies to grow churches so large and all-encompassing that they featured travel agencies, dating services, and coffee bars.
Copyright © 2024 by Eliza Griswold
