The evangelical left
‘We think everybody needs Jesus and we’re not mad at the world’
A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church on the southeast side of Houston defines the word resilient.
After a devastating fire in 2010 burned it to the ground and, worse, left it with fewer than 10 core members, it has risen.
As its pastor, the Rev. Kathleen Davies says, its 80-or-so members, who meet in the spiffy, eco-friendly new building, are old, young, black, brown and every hue in the LGBTQ rainbow.
“I’m the pastor of a church that welcomes everybody,” Davies says. “We believe in opening our doors.”
Some of Houston’s Christians would like you to know that the evangelical right wing has not cornered the market on, well, being evangelical. “We’re all spreading the Good News. ‘Evangelical’ should not be a scary word for us,” Davies says.
Though the evangelical movement is strongly identified with right-wing politics and conservative social views, a growing number of churches in the U.S., especially on the two coasts and in big cities, call themselves progressive evangelical congregations or sometimes evangelical left — or some other, less politically charged term of differentiation from their more right-wing cousins.
According to a 2014 Pew Research study, the numbers of self-identified Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. have declined from 26.3 percent to 25.4 percent of the population between 2007 and 2014 — not as steep as the decline in mainline Protestants but still significant.
Though he has been a leader of the evangelical left nationwide for nearly 50 years, to Jim Wallis, it feels like a changing of the generational guard.
“It’s a huge generational shift,” he says. “There’s a whole new generation of young evangelicals. This is the movement I thought was starting in the ’70s.”
Wallis believes the origins of American evangelicalism were never in conservative politics and that leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson turned it toward the religious right.
For Wallis, the founder of Sojourners magazine, the movement centers on a commitment to life and a “Matthew 25”-based faith, dedicated to helping the poor and vulnerable.
“The Bible is full of holes if you take out the poor,” he says.
David Swartz, who wrote the 2012 book “Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism,” says Wallis is right about politics.
“Historically, evangelicals have been anything but right wing,” he says, citing their early commitment to the abolition of slavery and to women’s rights.
In the ’60s, that led to environmental and anti-poverty activism and opposition to the Vietnam War.
As it has evolved, the non-right evangelical churches have developed some common characteristics, though they need not check off all the boxes, says Doug Pagitt, a leader in the “emerging church” movement that crisscrosses with progressive evangelicals. Some of their tenets: • They are engaged with the Christian church, often networking with other churches but not in a “name brand” denomination.
• They are open to the full participation of LGBTQ members. “That’s almost a litmus test,” Pagitt says.
• Women participate at every level.
• The Bible is a tool of tolerance and engagement. Science is OK.
• Faith requires a positive engagement in the world, especially work for peace and justice.
“It is Christian in the way of Jesus,” Pagitt says. “There is lots of Jesus talk.”
Servant-Savior belongs to a denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA and, Davies says, though it centers on the teachings of Jesus, it isn’t a textbook example of the progressive evangelical genre.
“One box we don’t check off is the understanding that if you don’t believe in Jesus you will go to hell,” she says. “Our motto is: We welcome all regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.”
Though downtown’s Ecclesia is probably the most well-known Houston church that fits the criteria of progressive evangelicalism, other churches fit parts of the profile.
One is South Main Baptist Church in Midtown, a city mainstay since 1903, with about 600 worshipers every Sunday.The pastor, Steve Wells, is not keen on labels. He sums up his church this way: “We think everybody needs Jesus and we’re not mad at the world.”
South Main Baptist also actively ministers to Houston’s homeless, offering, among other things, a weekly outdoor worship service and a chess club. “We have practical ministries that meet basic needs,” Wells says.
And it has a serious commitment to outreach, in Chengdu, China; Lima, Peru; and Kenya, where the church helps street kids who have become addicted to glue.
The church welcomes LGBTQ members — and Wells was, he says, the only Baptist minister to speak in favor of the HERO anti-discrimination ordinance — but stops short of endorsing samesex marriage.
“God loves everybody he ever made,” Wells says.
The Rev. Marty Troyer is about as thrilled with putting a progressive evangelical label on his church, Houston Mennonite, as the other pastors are, and he says it does fit many of the criteria. The 50-year-old congregation averaging about 50 souls every Sunday even calls itself The Peace Church.
“We’re a small congregation with a big reputation,” says Troyer, who has been pastor for eight years.
“One reason we stand out is our work to abolish the death penalty,” he says, and they also work on improving race relations, fair trade, human trafficking and immigration reform. “We’re a bit of a granola kind of church.”
And it meets a clear criterion. When Troyer and his wife moved to Houston, this is what they were looking for. “We wanted to find a church with the people we wanted our kids to be. “They’re a little quirky, with huge hearts.”