ATLANTA (RNS) — Twenty minutes outside downtown Atlanta, Vinings Lake sits along a humming thoroughfare connecting Veterans Memorial Highway to the affluent suburbs north of the city. With its white steeple and brick exterior, it could easily be mistaken for another Southern Baptist church adorning America’s Bible Belt.

But façade aside, the community no longer thinks of itself strictly as a church.

“We’re an ever-evolving spiritual collective,” the pastor, Cody Deese, said to those gathered in the dimly lit sanctuary on a rainy Sunday in early December. “If you’re a Christian, wonderful. If you’re post-Christian, wonderful.”

Vinings Lake is one of a handful of spiritual communities across the U.S. sprouting from the soil of the exvangelical and deconstruction movements. While their Sunday morning gatherings retain the basic structure of many Christian services — music, teachings, fellowship — these collectives reject dogma, prefer questions over answers and have no intention of converting anybody to anything. Here, LGBTQ inclusion is not up for debate, people of all and no faiths are welcome and Jesus can be a savior, a radical rabbi or a metaphor, depending on your spiritual inclination.

Though they are few, these communities are also emblematic of a larger groundswell of spiritual “nones” searching for new forms of ritual and belonging.

“There’s something reaching a critical mass,” said Kevin Miguel Garcia, spiritual coach and author of “What Makes You Bloom: Cultivating a Practice for Connecting With Your Divine Self.” “There’s a desire growing within people to figure out how to live meaningfully even without traditional structures. How do I live justly without baptizing myself into a faith? How do I love my neighbor, without having to proof text it with a Bible verse?”

In many ways, the evolution of Vinings Lake mirrors the spiritual path of its current pastor. Deese delivered his first sermon at age 16 and was groomed to follow the vocational footsteps of his father, a Southern Baptist pastor. But in his early 20s, he struggled to reconcile his notion of a loving God with the doctrine of hell.

Though his deconstruction journey was well underway, in 2006 Deese agreed to help his friend launch Vinings Lake, which began as a Southern Baptist church plant. In 2015 Deese was tapped to lead what had become a 700-person church. But by the end of the Trump administration, Deese’s LGBTQ-affirming theology and bold critiques of topics such as nationalism and capitalism had triggered an exodus of more than 500 people from the church. In 2021, Vinings Lake officially traded the label of “church” for “spiritual collective.”

“We knew there would be a cost. It’s not surprising for us,” said Deese. “You don’t step into the heart of the Bible Belt and try to create an ever-evolving spiritual collective, a progressive spiritual community, and expect there to be no resistance.”

Gradually, Vinings Lake began attracting newcomers such as Katie Mair. While working for an evangelical college ministry, Mair endured the death of a sibling and said she was spiritually abused by a leader in the organization she worked for. Believing in a God actively working for her good no longer felt possible, but Mair still longed for community. She found Vinings Lake by searching online for “progressive churches near me.”

Though certainty is more elusive at Vinings Lake, she said, her spirituality has never felt more authentic.

“I was never a whole person in evangelicalism,” said Mair. “I was always having to cut off part of me, or hide it, deny it or dress it up to look a little bit better.”

It’s common for folks at Vinings Lake to have stories of religious trauma or “church hurt.” Chelsea Carver, who leads the hospitality committee and identifies as a Christian, is no exception. She chose Vinings Lake in 2018 because the community made room for her tough questions, thanked her for listening to her gut and went out of its way to avoid drawing boundaries around who’s in and who’s out.

“Vinings Lake doesn’t tell me how to think. It gives me enough knowledge to struggle with it, and that’s what I love,” said Carver.

While some parishioners jokingly refer to Vinings Lake as a “unicorn church,” its story parallels that of a Miami community, Heartway. It, too, began as a Southern Baptist church plant whose pastor wrestled with concepts such as biblical inerrancy and opposition to LGBTQ leadership and marriage.

“Everything started to unravel for me rather quickly,” Heartway pastor Danny Prada told Religion News Service. “The challenge of that was still going up and preaching a sermon every Sunday, when on the inside I was doubting the legitimacy of the whole thing.”

Eventually, Prada shared his doubts with the congregation. “That ruffled some feathers,” Prada acknowledged. But Prada’s honesty slowly attracted exvangelicals, people who’d experienced religious trauma and even yogis and New Age spiritualists who found that Prada’s teachings resonated with them. In 2019, Heartway rebranded as a spiritual community.

“The focus is less on beliefs and dogma, whether conservative or progressive, and more about the experience, the practical spirituality,” said Prada.

That’s also the case for Aldea, another evangelical-church-turned-spiritual-community bound by values rather than beliefs.

“Our motto is ‘love, period,’” said Jake Haber, pastor of the Tucson, Arizona-based group. “We determine what these wisdom texts are saying through the lens of love, rather than determining what love means through the lens of a wisdom text.”

Because these communities were formed in reaction to evangelicalism, defining themselves by what they are, rather than what they are not, wasn’t always straightforward. In their early years, Heartway and Vinings Lake both struggled to avoid reinforcing the very binaries (in/out, right/wrong) they rejected initially.

“Sometimes exvangelicalis still hold very tight to their fundamentalism,” observed Felicia Murrell, an author and onetime teaching pastor at Vinings Lake. “They are still protesting. And there’s a place inside of them that needs everyone outside of them to believe what they believe.”

Instead of trying to win over their former evangelical peers to their version of spirituality, these groups have ultimately let go of the concept of conversion altogether. For them, doctrine, be it theologically conservative or progressive, is never prescriptive or a prerequisite.

“I stopped feeling the need to try and convince the Christians that they were wrong,” Prada said about Heartway.

Vinings Lake, Heartway and Aldea espouse values over doctrine, including commitments to inclusion and diversity, enacting social justice, seeking wisdom from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions, viewing Jesus as a model for spiritual living and honoring lived experience as sacred.

How to translate these broad values to a congregational setting, though, isn’t self-evident, particularly when gatherings are populated by self-described religious mutts, with a full spectrum of opinions. Heartway has retained a seeker-sensitive model of worship music that incorporates the beats and electronic sounds of house music and hip-hop, while Aldea has opted for nonreligious music with spiritual themes from the likes of the Beatles or U2. At Vinings Lake, music is a low-key affair, with a person or two singing hymns or stripped-down songs about human flourishing.

While Deese typically grounds his teachings in the Bible (though it’s framed as a collection of inspired writings, not a list of answers), Haber’s talks are more based on the human experience than a particular text. All three pastors incorporate traditions beyond Christianity.

“Last weekend I was quoting the Tao Te Ching. Sometimes I quote the Bhagavad Gita. Other times I call different psychologists and philosophers that I bring into the conversation,” said Prada. “It’s an experiment, for sure.”

Shaped by their evangelical roots, these communities tend to adopt “low church” formats. Pastors wear sneakers, lobbies are equipped with coffee carafes and to-go cups, pulpits are rare and liturgies — where present — are minimal. At Vinings Lake, Communion is simply “the table”: a time during services where participants are invited to ingest the bread, gluten-free wafers, juice or wine displayed on a table in the center of the room. There’s little to no preamble and attendees can interpret the event however they wish.

“I find it really compelling that the night before Jesus was killed … he’s like, I have to get friends together,” Deese told RNS. “He gets his people together, even one that is going to betray him. And he sits at a table and raises up a glass, and the text says he gives thanks. For me, that ritual is the practice of gratitude once a week.”

Because of their experimental nature, some of the more granular details of these communities are still in flux. Without larger institutional scaffolding, what should safeguarding and accountability look like? How do you build student curricula based on spiritual values, not beliefs? The leadership takes different forms — Vinings Lake has a board of directors; Aldea has a leadership team; Prada described a group of “core leaders.” The financial and reputational costs associated with these communities — all of them reliant on attendees’ donations — also make them difficult to replicate. Churches wanting to try out similar models often risk losing congregants and severing ties with funders. These barriers can disincentivize people who already face hurdles in ministry from forming spiritual collectives of their own.

“I imagine that churches led by women, and churches led by people of color, particularly nondenominational churches that are no longer supported by a denomination, their budgets are already tapped,” said Murrell. So making polarizing statements, like becoming openly LGBTQ-affirming, she said, could “force the church to close its doors.”

Despite the obstacles to forming like-minded collectives, Prada, Haber and Deese said it feels like their communities are on the edge of a much larger spiritual shift. Haber pointed to the decline of traditional Christianity and growth of the spiritual “nones” — earlier this month, Pew Research released data showing 22% of Americans now identify as “spiritual but not religious.” Of that group, Pew found only 11% say they are involved in a religious community.

“There’s a huge migration of people, but there’s not yet a system and a structure to meet them,” said Haber. “This is our best attempt at creating something we think could really work in this world.”

“Grove City College has not changed,” a committee composed largely of Grove City board members said in the report released last week. “It remains a Christ-centered, conservative institution.”

The report, a product of the committee’s assignment to ascertain any “mission drift” at the college, recommends re-adding the word “conservative” to the school’s mission statement after it was removed in 2021 and lists “remedial actions” to curb the promotion of critical race theory at the school. These actions include replacing an education course accused of promoting “pop-CRT,” rebranding the school’s Office of Multicultural Education and Initiatives and exercising increased scrutiny of guest speakers and student trainings.

Tisby, The New York Times bestselling author of “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism,” told Religion News Service the report uses CRT as “a junk drawer for anything about race or justice that makes a certain type of person feel uncomfortable.” Because of the rhetoric around CRT, he said, “much needed conversations about racial justice are being muted in the environments where they are needed most, such as Christian colleges and universities.”

Others found the report encouraging. Megan Basham, an author at conservative news outlet The Daily Wire, tweeted that it offered a “straight-forward, honest assessment,” and said she appreciated its clarifying description of how CRT is incompatible with the school’s mission. “Well worth reading the entire report. Bravo!”

Matt Kennedy, rector at an Anglican church in Binghamton, New York, and his wife Anne Carlson Kennedy praised the report on their podcast.

“The best part of it is the description of critical race theory upfront, which is just one of the best short summaries of the problems of critical race theory I’ve ever read,” said Matt Kennedy.

LISTEN to the RLC Podcast with Jemar Tisby on White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and Racism

The report says critical race theory is incompatible with the school’s vision, mission and values because it evaluates people based on their race and antiracist works, can’t be separated from political activism, “uncharitably detects aggression where none is intended” and sometimes “demeans rational argument as itself racist and oppressive.”

The school, which has just 2,400 full-time students, was first accused of promoting critical race theory, an academic framework that sees racism as embedded in institutions and policies, in a November petition authored by Grove City parents and alumni. The petition alleged that this “destructive and profoundly unbiblical worldview” was asserted at the college in a fall 2020 chapel presentation by Tisby.

The petition also called into question the chapel screening of a pre-recorded TED talk by Bryan Stevenson, an Equal Justice Initiative founder and criminal justice reform advocate; as well as a Resident Assistant training that invoked the concepts of white privilege and white guilt. Additionally, the petition decried several books used in an education studies class and in focus groups, including Ibram X. Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” and Wheaton professor Esau McCaulley’s “Reading While Black.”

That initial petition triggered a flood of follow-up petitions, articles and open letters debating whether the school had forsaken its traditional values. In February, the college’s board of trustees categorically rejected critical race theory and introduced a committee to investigate the allegations of mission-drift. Grove City College did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The report notes that Tisby’s October 2020 chapel presentation is the chapel service that has “drawn the most attention from critics.” According to the report, most Grove City leaders interviewed said inviting Tisby to speak in chapel was a “mistake” due to what they described as his evolution.

“Most of those in GCC leadership with whom we spoke observed that ‘the Jemar Tisby that we thought we invited in 2019 is not the Jemar Tisby that we heard in 2020 or that we now read about,’” the report stated, citing Tisby’s short stint as assistant director of narrative and advocacy at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research and the “progressive policies” he advocates in his latest book as evidence of his transformation.

Tisby told RNS that his convictions did not change between 2019 and 2020 — what changed was the socio-political climate.

The chapel in question, called “The Urgency of Now,” was a 21-minute sermon that drew parallels between the biblical story of Esther and the modern-day movement for racial justice. Tisby quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and letter from Birmingham Jail and called on those in attendance to engage in racial justice work.

“Many of you, unfortunately, are in the target demographic whom King called the ‘white moderate,’” Tisby said in the chapel. Tisby asked the listeners to “fill your minds with an awareness of racial justice so that five, 10, 20 years from now, you don’t have to say ‘I never knew.’”

Tisby told RNS the allegations that his sermon promoted CRT are “ludicrous.” While the November petition charged Tisby with being an “outspoken apologist for CRT,” Tisby said he has never been trained in critical race theory.

“What most people, including compilers of this report, are calling critical race theory is not critical race theory,” he said. “My work is influenced by the study of history. It doesn’t take a specific training in critical race theory to understand that racism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice but a matter of policy.”

WATCH the RLC Faith Forum on Race and Justice

The report also found that an educational course called “Cultural Diversity and Advocacy” “effectively promoted pop-CRT” because it offered readings such as Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” without “a critical or opposing perspective.” It found that the director of Multicultural Education and Initiatives promoted “‘woke’ concepts” in a book club and parroted “CRT concepts” in a training for Resident Assistants that criticized the “concept of race neutrality.”

Warren Throckmorton, a professor of psychology at Grove City, said he doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the report’s findings because it offers a faulty definition of CRT. According to Throckmorton, the report says CRT embraces biological distinctions — however, he said, CRT rejects biological distinctions because it sees race as socially constructed. He also pointed to a footnote that says: “Our references to CRT include popular ‘CRT-adjacent’ advocacy cloaked in the secular or religious language of social justice.’”

“That could be anything, couldn’t it?” asked Throckmorton. “So when they say they found CRT, what did they really find?”

While the report promises not to ban books, Throckmorton said that promise has done little to reassure professors who are questioning if and how to teach on topics like health disparities or social justice in the classroom. Natalie Kahler, a Grove City alumna (’94) who authored a March 8 petition asking the school not to inhibit discussions about racism on campus, told RNS she’s worried the report’s findings could lead to “indoctrinating and not educating,” especially given the fact that Grove City professors don’t receive tenure and are given one-year contracts.

“If you create an environment where people are constantly afraid for their job, and are afraid something they might say could be interpreted as CRT because everybody is interpreting CRT in very different ways, they’re creating a culture where people aren’t going to be able to have hard conversations,” said Khaler.

In March, Jon Fea, professor of American history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, wrote an article showing Grove City’s board chair, Edward D. Breen, has advocated for diversity, equity and inclusion as CEO of the chemicals company DuPont. “(I)s the Edward Breen who led the Grove City College Board’s condemnation of critical race theory the same guy working for racial justice at DuPont?” Fea asks.

Another board member, David Forney, is pastor of a Charlottesville church and has offered a list of racial justice resources to his congregation on the church website, including TED Talks by Bryan Stevenson and the books “How To Be an Antiracist” and “Between the World and Me,” both of which the report characterized as promoting “pop-CRT.”

“I am puzzled that these resources are considered fine and helpful for a board member to recommend to his congregation but are considered off-mission for our faculty to assign as study resources for a college course,” Throckmorton said in an email to RNS. Neither Breen nor Forney could be reached for comment.

Tisby said that the CRT debate at Grove City points to a broader “sorting” in Christian higher education between schools working to be more racially and ethnically inclusive and those doubling down on appealing to “a very small but loyal constituency that does not want to meaningfully engage with vital conversations around racism.”

On his podcast, Kennedy suggested that Grove City is exemplifying how other Christian organizations ought to approach CRT. “Congregations, denominations, need to start seeing wokeness as a heresy,” said Kennedy. He added that “the language employed by especially Christian ‘wokesters’ is very, very gospel-like. And so the unwary can be pulled-in and you have compassion on them. But the leaders of this thing, those people need to be driven out of the church.”

Tisby said Grove City’s response to CRT should be taken as a warning.

“(A)nyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, who speaks up for racial justice could be a victim of these kinds of attacks,” Tisby said. “And, I would say, these actions are all the more lamentable because they come out of Christian institutions. We follow a savior who said, ‘you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ But we have people who profess to be followers of Christ, who seem to be running from the truth about racism.”

This piece first appeared at Religious News Services.

For more from Jemar Tisby, you can listen to the RLC Book Club from January 2021, the MLK event at Riverside, and the RLC Book Club Kids Edition from January 2022.

Red Letter Christians, a movement of left-leaning evangelicals, led a diverse group of faith leaders in a two-day rally against gun violence in Houston this past weekend. The event came the same week as a new Texas law went into effect allowing citizens to carry firearms in public without a license, while eliminating a previously mandatory five-hour gun law and safety training.

Planned to coincide with the National Rifle Association’s annual convention, originally scheduled for Houston last weekend, the Red Letter Christians’ gathering went on despite the cancellation of the NRA event, which would have included a 150^th anniversary celebration.

Calling the rally “Change: A Faithful Response to Gun Violence,” it also is available to view online through Facebook Live archives.

The two-day event also took place after more than 20,000 Americans died by gun violence in 2020 — the highest rate in at least two decades — and another 24,000 lost their lives to suicide with a gun, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“In the last 45 years, we’ve had more gun deaths domestically than in all of the wars in US history combined,” said Shane Claiborne, co-founder of Red Letter Christians. “So that’s worth grieving.”

On Saturday there was a hands-on gun disarming workshop at Houston Mennonite Church in partnership with RAWtools, a Colorado-based organization that transforms guns into garden tools as a reflection of Bible prophecies about turning swords into plowshares. The workshop taught local faith leaders how to safely disable unwanted firearms according to federal guidelines.

Saturday also included a service of remembrance at Houston’s Episcopal Christ Cathedral to honor the memory of those who have lost their lives to gun violence. During the service, an AR-15 rifle from an anonymous donor was forged into a garden tool. On Sunday, there was a national service of hope and action at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church.

Events took place outdoors when possible, and attendees were required to be masked and vaccinated.

“It’s time to stop trusting in this myth of redemptive violence that more guns are going to make us safer,” said Claiborne.

READ: The Morning After Ida Makes Landfall, a Prayer

Faith leaders participating included the Rev. Deanna Hollas, gun violence prevention ministry coordinator with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship; Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston; and the Rev. Harvey Clemons Jr., native Houstonian and pastor of Pleasant Hill Baptist, among others.

Red Letter Christians, founded in 2007 by Claiborne and Tony Campolo, aims to mobilize Christians to live out Jesus’ “radical, counter-cultural” teachings, according to their website.