A report from the Post-Evangelical Collective meeting in Boston

The momentum is growing. The Post-Evangelical Collective has a bright future, but also key issues to consider.

What follows are some observations from my fourth national Post-Evangelical Collective conference. In order, they have been Denver (2023), Raleigh (2024), Nashville (2025) and now Boston, a meeting that occurred last Tuesday and Wednesday. The Dallas 2027 meeting already has been announced.

Sponsors see the potential

The list of sponsors is growing, and it is extending more deeply into the seminary and publishing world. Seminaries know PEC is now a significant recruiting venue. Publishers likewise know PEC is a significant place to recruit authors and announce books. Various other nonprofits know PEC is a place to announce their parachurch and ministry support initiatives.

PEC is definitely on the map. I was sitting at a table at PEC on Tuesday night talking with three students who may come for a Ph.D. with me at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam/IBTS, and another who might come study at the master’s level at Mercer University’s School of Theology.

In a time when seminary enrollments are declining and many denominational churches are not producing future ministers, this is a trend worth noting.

Numbers keep going up

I did not see a final attendance number, but it certainly seemed that at least 400 people were present. Each national PEC meeting has been substantially bigger than the one before. Large venues are now required to host this meeting. Reservoir Church in Cambridge was by far the largest venue we have met in, and it was nearly full.

“Each national PEC meeting has been substantially bigger than the one before.”

By comparison, the PEC national meeting is now at least as large as the Society of Christian Ethics, which has been meeting since the late 1950s. Publishers know this, and that is one reason why they are attending.

In a time when many churches and denominations are seeing declining numbers, this is significant.

Contemporary but adapted worship

Each session at PEC was interlaced with very skillfully led worship music. The music could have been sung comfortably at any evangelical church, although I do notice in post-evangelical spaces a tendency toward less triumphal and more reflective music.

Worship leaders also explicitly gave participants permission to sit or stand, raise hands or not, sing or not. Post-evangelicals are very much aware of the manipulative uses of worship music in some evangelical spaces, as well as certain behavioral expectations associated with displaying piety. They explicitly named this and worked against it at the PEC meeting.

I don’t see any evidence post-evangelicals are eager to return to pre-contemporary-worship forms, although they are certainly making adaptations in worship music.

While some post-evangelical churches offer blended worship styles, this appears most common among those in denominational spaces, which is only one type of post-evangelical church. I am not too optimistic about the prospects of churches that are unwilling to offer any contemporary forms of musical expression.

An egalitarian ethos

A fascinating move PEC Executive Director Keri Ladouceur made was her decision to feature multiple speakers in the plenary sessions and not to announce who they would be. The carefully curated, highly diverse list of speakers included many who are not especially well-known. But the main point here was that by not announcing who the plenary speakers were, PEC signals this was not going to be about personalities.

There is a definite rejection of celebrity culture. I should also mention that speakers are not paid, and they are expected to stay for most or all of the conference.

It will be interesting to watch whether post-evangelicals will be able to maintain a more-or-less horizontal and egalitarian culture. Leaders emerge in all human communities. That is inevitable. I guess the question is what kind of culture around leaders, and leadership, is created.

Shared ethos but not shared theology

PEC has no creed, and my conclusion after four national PEC meetings plus other events is that post-evangelicals, at least of the PEC type, do not have a shared theology or a shared approach to theology. But PEC people do have a shared sociology (being former evangelicals), shared pain (most have had wounding experiences in evangelicalism), and shared ethos (such as inclusion, justice and grace, as well as supporting theological reconstruction and post-evangelical church life). They also have a joyful shared sense of at-homeness in the spaces PEC is creating and curating.

This means while some speakers at this year’s PEC meeting offered biblical expositions and sounded familiar pastoral and theological themes, others offered ideas further away from traditional theology. Two speakers at this PEC meeting, for example, riffed on John 14:1-14, which happened to be the Lectionary text for May 3; but a different speaker offered an argument for the need to move from atonement theology to attunement theology.

All speakers were listened to respectfully. No one appeared to feel the need to police theological boundaries, although of course the choice of speakers in effect ratifies (at least) the range of views and approaches that will be platformed at PEC. Post-evangelicals are not becoming post-Christian (by my definition, anyway), although some are certainly questioning various forms of theological orthodoxy.

This will be an interesting area to watch. Even noncreedal Christian communities have thought boundaries. Sometimes these boundaries only become visible when they are crossed and people protest.

Institutionalization and structure

PEC has now held (I believe) five national meetings. We have organized ourselves into regional hub structure with 15 different hub cities/leaders and have held multiple meetings in each region. We have nonprofit status, a working board, a wisdom board (of which I am a member), a respected executive director, dozens of affiliated churches all over the nation, and a growing sense of momentum.

A word to CBF Baptists

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is a network of churches with roots far older than the current post-evangelical movement or, indeed, the evangelical vs. Mainline distinction that preceded it.

CBF today has congregations some of which could be described as resembling Mainline Protestant churches, others resembling evangelical churches and some with an (uneasy) mix of both — a paradigm that does not appear sustainable today.

I see younger leadership in CBF churches trending progressive with some drawn to the post-evangelical world that is being born. I invite such leaders and churches to consider coming alongside or entering the post-evangelical community. Both sides would be strengthened by the relationship.

 

​David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.

 

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