The PCA-Progressive Coalition: AMR, Letter of Lament, Revoice, and CBE

This is the smallest essay in the statement-ledger series and, in some ways, the most editorially interesting. Read in isolation, the four ledgers we cross-reference here look almost too small to matter — eight churches on AMR Leadership, four on the PCA Letter of Lament, two on the CBE Egalitarian Network, and a single congregation on the Revoice speakers and endorsers list. Fifteen ledger entries across the four, fourteen unique churches once the overlaps collapse. A combined dataset smaller than our drift watchlist's largest single bucket.

And yet — read together as a coordinated coalition rather than as four separate ledgers — these fourteen churches map something that no individual ledger reveals: the institutional architecture of the soft-progressive PCA wing. The same names recur. The same congregations carry signatures across multiple ledgers. The same urban-PCA professional-class corridor (DC, Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Memphis, Chicago, Long Beach) shows up over and over. Reading the four ledgers as one network is the only way to see what is actually there.

This is the fourth installment of the editorial ledger series. The Nashville, Dallas, and Warhurst essays mapped the three larger ledgers individually. This essay collapses the four smaller ledgers into one composite — partly because each is too small to support a standalone analysis, and partly because the overlap pattern makes the composite far more revealing than any single piece would be on its own.

What These Four Ledgers Are

The Fourteen Churches

The composite list of churches with at least one signer across any of the four ledgers — sorted by total ledger entries (most overlapping first), with each ledger entry shown as a column:

The PCA-Progressive Coalition Architecture

The single most important pattern in this dataset is the overlap with the Warhurst Protest list. Nine of the fourteen churches — almost two-thirds — also appear on the Warhurst signer list we mapped in our previous essay. This is not a statistical accident. The same pastors and elders who protested Missouri Presbytery's handling of Greg Johnson in 2020 are the same pastors and elders who, in subsequent years, joined AMR's institutional advocacy, signed the PCA Letter of Lament, or participated as Revoice speakers and endorsers. The four small ledgers are not four independent movements. They are four documentary residues of one coordinated cohort.

The coalition's institutional architecture, read from the data, has four legs:

• The advocacy nonprofit — AMR Leadership 2026, providing tax-deductible institutional infrastructure outside formal PCA governance. The 17 named members include several Trinity Pres churches (Fort Worth, Hinsdale, Winston-Salem, plus the new Western Springs plant), Independent Presbyterian Memphis (with two signers), Spanish River PCA Boca Raton, RUF Belmont, and the Kindred Hope plant in Atlanta.
• The denominational protest letter — the December 2025 Letter of Lament, signed by Irwyn Ince, Duke Kwon, and a coordinated group of urban-PCA pastors. Names Kindred Hope Atlanta, Christ Central Centreville, Grace Meridian Hill DC (the Mark Batterson-adjacent Grace DC Network plant, the only red-rated church in the small-ledger map), and West Charlotte Church at Freedom.
• The Side-B sexuality conference — Revoice 2018-2026. The PCA-side dominance of Revoice is documented in the Warhurst essay (Memorial Presbyterian St. Louis, the Missouri Presbytery cluster, Covenant Theological Seminary network); the one church in our data outside that PCA cluster is Grace Fellowship Church (Charlotte, NC) — a Reformed Baptist congregation, currently rated green in our directory, where a staff member appears as a Revoice speaker. That single non-PCA outlier is significant: it's the documentary evidence that the Revoice movement has cross-pollinated beyond its institutional PCA base into the broader Reformed-evangelical world.
• The egalitarian theological infrastructure — CBE International, the long-running parachurch advocate for women's ordination and gender-neutral pastoral roles. Two churches in our directory have publicly identified CBE-connected leaders: Old Peachtree Presbyterian (Duluth, GA) and Union Church of Lima (Peru). The Lima church is the only non-US congregation in the entire small-ledger composite — a reminder that egalitarian theology is a transnational rather than purely American institutional carrier.

These four legs are not equally weighted, and they do not function as four interchangeable expressions of the same idea. They are four different institutional tools deployed by an overlapping cohort to advance a coordinated set of theological positions: that the gender ethic of the Westminster Standards is open to reformation, that the PCA's recent disciplinary posture toward Side-B-affirming ministers has been too severe, that the conservative confessionalist coalition's victories at General Assembly votes constitute institutional harm worth lamenting publicly, and that the egalitarian reading of pastoral roles deserves visible advocacy.

A coalition that runs out of small overlapping ledgers, none of which is large in isolation but all of which name the same recurring institutional carriers, is not a fringe phenomenon. It is the documented signature of a coordinated movement operating across multiple parallel channels.

The Two Non-PCA Outliers

Two of the fourteen churches in this composite are not PCA: Grace Fellowship Church (Charlotte, NC) — Reformed Baptist, rated green in our directory — appears on the Revoice list; and Union Church of Lima — Evangelical, rated green, in Peru — appears on the CBE list.

These two outliers are worth flagging on the drift watchlist as stale-rating candidates — both are currently green but carry a red-direction signature. For Grace Fellowship Charlotte, the question is whether the staff member's Revoice involvement reflects the congregation's overall posture (in which case the rating should move to yellow), or whether it's a single-staffer position the congregation does not endorse (in which case the green stands and the signature is historical context only). For Union Church of Lima, the CBE listing may reflect a denominational position the local congregation does not particularly emphasize — or it may signal that the congregation's elder/leadership structure has been egalitarian for longer than the MOOP rubric has tracked. Each warrants a manual review pass.

What This Cohort Tells Us

The small-ledger composite tells us three things the larger ledgers cannot tell on their own.

First, the soft-progressive PCA wing is institutionally coordinated, not just diffusely sympathetic. Four parallel ledgers, fourteen churches, nine of them also on the Warhurst list — that pattern of overlap is what an organized coalition looks like in documentary residue. The signers are not scattered individuals. They are an identifiable cohort.

Second, the coalition is denominationally focused but not denominationally captive. Thirteen of fourteen churches are PCA, but the one Reformed Baptist outlier (Grace Fellowship Charlotte on Revoice) and the one Peruvian Evangelical outlier (Union Church Lima on CBE) document the cohort's reach beyond formal PCA boundaries. The coalition is centered in the PCA but actively cross-pollinates into adjacent Reformed-evangelical bodies.

Third, the editorial signal is strongest at the intersection. A single small-ledger signature is meaningful but weak (8 AMR signers, 4 Lament signers, 2 CBE signers, 1 Revoice signer — each cohort tiny in isolation). What gives the composite its editorial weight is the overlap — the recurring presence of the same congregations across multiple ledgers. Kindred Hope Atlanta carries five signatures across five different ledgers (AMR + LoL + Warhurst + Nashville + Dallas), which is the densest single example in the entire dataset of a church serving as institutional connective tissue between the conservative-confessionalist and soft-progressive PCA wings. That density is what makes it interesting.

The forthcoming 7-Ledger Map synthesis essay — the capstone of this series — will lay out the full institutional geometry, plotting all seven ledgers against the 462 cross-referenced churches in one visualization. The four small ledgers covered here will form one corner of that map. The Nashville, Dallas, and Warhurst maps will form the other three. Read together, they will tell the story of where American confessional evangelicalism's institutional carriers are concentrated, where they have held, where they have drifted, and where they intersect in surprising ways.

The smallest ledgers tell us about coalition behavior. The largest ledgers tell us about doctrinal commitment. The synthesis tells us how the two relate. That synthesis is the work the directory has been pointing toward all along.

Adam "MOOP" Johns is a Christ-following husband and father, retired US Marine, military aviator, and combat veteran (21 years of service), NASM-certified personal trainer, and men's discipleship coach who has been investing in the formation of men for over 25 years. He holds an M.Div. from Liberty University and founded U.S.M.C. Ministries — Uniting, Serving, Mentoring & Counseling — in Fredericksburg, VA.