“Maybe sometimes living at the edge of social change, at the seams between the world that we have and the world we are hoping to create, means that sometimes our sentences just trail off.” (Han, Undivided, p. 241)
I don’t know that I can do justice to this book in a brief post, but I found this book really touching, and hopeful. I think it’s easy to get tangled in glib media narratives that flatten attempted change into victory or defeat; or attempt, and failure, and backlash. For one, this book gives a more hopeful picture, but it doesn’t elide the challenges in the story, too.
I read Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope recently as well, and it’s hard not to read these two books as in dialogue with each other in some way. Circle is about a church that tried to reform itself in some ways, but found the contradictions irreconcilable, and ultimately disbanded. Some of it may be due to personnel: in Griswold’s telling, the leaders of Circle were resistant in some ways; and those engaged in the push for change had flaws and limitations of various kinds. Some of it, I think, is that Crossroads had better mechanisms for “loving and letting go” its parishioners and staff who felt called to work in ways that the church itself might not have been able to support. (Some of it may have just been money: it seems clear that Crossroads was just a much more affluent congregation than Circle of Hope, and Circle was constrained by their congregational affiliation.) But some of it is that the ecclesiological and theological commitments of Crossroads may have different. According to one of the central figures in the book, the senior pastor says, “I absolutely want people of color to feel seen and heard, but I also don’t want to give up on the people who are racist.” (203) It seems to be the case that the founding pastor of Circle held similar views, but that these more inclusive convictions were sidelined as the church pushed for racial and LGBTQ justice.
Han is clear that tensions remained (and perhaps even signs of incipient backlash), even as Crossroads enabled personal changes that helped enable efforts to make social, structural change. She might have sharpened those tensions a bit, but her argument is that the people involved in Undivided were transformed in a way that allowed them to push for structural changes. Griswold’s take is a bit more downbeat, but perhaps it’s the case that Circle’s efforts were generative in their ways, too.