Where the Dallas Statement Signers Lead Today

One year after the Nashville Statement put evangelical leaders on the record about biblical sexuality, a different group — overlapping but not identical — drafted a second line in the sand. In September 2018, John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, Voddie Baucham, James Coates, Tom Ascol, and a handful of other conservative pastors released the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, drafted in Dallas and forever after referred to by that name. It was, like Nashville, a fourteen-article document. It was also, like Nashville, immediately controversial — but for a different reason. Where the Nashville Statement had drawn a line against the cultural drift on sexuality, the Dallas Statement drew a line against an internal evangelical drift: the adoption of critical-theory frameworks (intersectionality, structural racism as a comprehensive interpretive grid, "white evangelical privilege" as a moral category) inside the SBC, the PCA, and the broader Reformed-evangelical world.

The Dallas Statement provoked a sharper internal backlash than Nashville. Some center-evangelical voices who had signed Nashville the previous year declined to sign Dallas. Russell Moore, then president of the ERLC, was conspicuously absent from the signers list. The MLK50 Conference held earlier that year — which had heavily featured Eric Mason and Jemar Tisby on race, justice, and the church — had set the stage for the controversy; the Dallas Statement was, in part, the conservative response. By 2019, the SBC had taken up Resolution 9 (critical race theory and intersectionality "may be employed as analytical tools..."), and the divide became formally institutional.

Eight years on, the question I find most useful is the same one we asked of the Nashville signers six months ago: where do the people who signed it actually pastor today? The answer is the map below — 166 churches across the country, with a particular concentration in Texas, California, Virginia, and the Old South. It is, deliberately, the second installment of a multi-part editorial series mapping the institutional shape of confessional evangelicalism in America. The Nashville companion piece draws the same map for the 2017 sexuality line; this one draws it for the 2018 social-justice line; future installments will draw it for the remaining five ledgers we cross-reference. Read together, they form a picture of where the confessional center is concentrated, where it has held, and where it has drifted.

What the Dallas Statement Was

The September 2018 statement runs to fourteen articles, each of which affirms a biblical-doctrinal position and then denies a contemporary departure from it. Its drafters were unambiguous about their target — they were not protesting "racial justice" in the abstract, and they explicitly affirmed the sinfulness of partiality, ethnic prejudice, and structural injustice where it could be biblically demonstrated. What they protested was the method: the importing of critical-theory categories ("systemic," "intersectional," "the lived experience of marginalized groups as an epistemic privilege") as the lens through which Scripture was to be interpreted. Article 11 was the load-bearing claim: that the gospel "necessarily condemns" sin in every direction, including the sin of partiality, but does so on the authority of Scripture alone, not on the authority of any social-theoretic apparatus.

The statement attracted roughly 13,000 signatures in its first months. It also attracted denunciations from inside evangelical institutions in a way Nashville largely had not — because Nashville had told the secular culture what conservative evangelicals believed about sexuality, whereas Dallas told other evangelicals what the drafters believed had gone wrong inside the household of faith. The cost of signing was therefore higher: a Nashville signature might cost you a city-council seat; a Dallas signature might cost you a denominational committee assignment. Some pastors signed anyway. Eight years later, they are the population this essay is about.

The Dallas Statement was a more expensive signature than Nashville, because it cost the signer institutional standing inside his own coalition rather than outside of it. That sorting is precisely why the map eight years later is worth drawing.

One Hundred and Sixty-Six Churches Across the Country

Of the 13,895 churches in our working directory, 166 have at least one publicly identified Dallas Statement signer in current leadership. That's about 1.2% of the total directory — a smaller share than the Nashville map's 2.1% — which itself reflects the higher cost of the Dallas signature: fewer pastors signed, and of those who signed, a smaller subset are publicly identifiable today (some retired, some moved, some are now serving in seminary or parachurch roles rather than local-church pastorates). The 166 churches are nevertheless a real and locatable institutional carrier.

Texas leads at 28 churches — the largest single state in the Dallas dataset, just as it was in the Nashville dataset, and for many of the same institutional reasons (Dallas Theological Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the unusual density of Reformed Baptist and SBC congregations in the DFW metroplex). California is second at 18, then Virginia at 15, Florida at 13, Georgia at 11. The South-and-Old-Confederacy axis is dominant: add Tennessee 8, South Carolina 6, Alabama 5, Louisiana 5, and you have nearly half the dataset inside the Bible Belt. New York, Illinois, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest contribute single-digit but non-zero presences — the same thin-but-real distribution pattern we saw in the Nashville data.

Two specific congregations anchor an outsized share of the editorial weight. Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California — John MacArthur's congregation — is where the Dallas Statement was effectively drafted, and the lineage of pastors and elders ordained out of that one church into other congregations across the country is the single largest institutional vector for the Dallas signature. Heritage Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana — Tom Ascol's pastorate, and the home of Founders Ministries — is the second anchor; through Founders, the Dallas Statement has been pressed into the SBC for nearly a decade.

The Denominational Map

The denominational shape is recognizably the same as Nashville's — the Southern Baptist Convention again dominant (39%), Non-Denominational and Reformed Baptist together a second large block (31%), Presbyterian-Reformed bodies a meaningful third (13%). What is different is the relative weight of Reformed Baptist congregations: Dallas has 25 Reformed Baptist signers to Nashville's 18. The Founders Ministries network, the Confessional Baptist tradition, and the cluster of 1689 LBCF-confessing congregations punch above their numerical size in the Dallas data — which makes sense given Tom Ascol's central role in the drafting.

The CREC (Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — Doug Wilson's federation) appears in the Dallas data as it did not in Nashville. All Saints Church (CREC) in New Holland, PA is the only canonical CREC entry with a confirmed Dallas signer at this point in our research; Christ Church Moscow — the most prominent CREC congregation — has two Dallas signers in our data (it rates yellow rather than green because of the broader institutional questions that surround the CREC, not the Dallas signature itself). The Wilson-cluster's increased visibility on Dallas vs. Nashville is one of the small but real patterns in the dataset.

The Nashville-and-Dallas Dual Witness

The single most important pattern in the data is what I have been calling the dual witness — pastors who signed the Nashville Statement in 2017 and signed the Dallas Statement in 2018. Seventy-two of the 166 Dallas-signer churches are also Nashville-signer churches. That's 43% of the Dallas dataset and 24% of the Nashville dataset. These are the pastors who put their name to both lines in the sand — sexuality and social-justice — at the cost of both rounds of backlash.

The 72 dual-witness churches are not, on average, larger or more institutionally significant than the rest of the directory. What distinguishes them is their posture: when subsequent confessional moments arose, they did not stay quiet. A pastor who signs one public statement might be sincere; a pastor who signs two distinct statements, twelve months apart, on materially different doctrinal terrain, is demonstrating a pattern of conviction. That posture is, in our experience, the single best leading indicator that a church's overall rating in the directory will be green.

The geographic distribution of the dual-witness 72 maps closely onto the Bible Belt + Reformed-evangelical corridor: Heritage Baptist Shreveport, The City Church Fort Worth, First Baptist Church Sanford NC, First Baptist Church Melbourne, Heritage Baptist Church Lynchburg, Pillar Church at Locust Grove, Calvary Chapel Manassas, Covenant Bible Church North Georgetown TX, First Baptist Church Van Buren AR, Grace Community Church Sun Valley. These are the institutional anchors. Each one is worth looking at individually on its profile page, because each one has its own story — a network history, a pastoral lineage, a relationship with one or more of the seminaries that have shaped the cohort.

A single signature is a moment. A second signature, on a different doctrinal question, in a different cultural moment, is a pattern. The 72-church dual-witness map is the cleanest available signal of which pastors treat public confession as a recurring obligation rather than a one-time event.

The Eight Drifters

Eight of the 166 Dallas-signer churches are rated red or black in our current rubric — congregations whose pastor or staff signed the 2018 line but whose church has since moved in ways the original signature would not have predicted. Five of the eight also signed Nashville (marked +N below), making them dual-signer drifters — the strongest possible "this is genuine drift" call in our dataset.

The drift patterns vary. West Lynchburg Baptist and LCBC Manheim are SBC and non-denominational congregations respectively where a staff member who signed Dallas is no longer the senior leader, and the current trajectory of the church has moved away from the 2018 cohort. Bayside Roseville is the prosperity-adjacent Ray Johnston megachurch — a Dallas signature there is a striking historical fact given Bayside's current theological posture. Mount Paran Atlanta is the prosperity-adjacent David Cooper congregation that has, like Bayside, drifted toward signs-and-wonders charismaticism in a way the 2018 cohort would not have endorsed. Forefront Brooklyn is the fully-progressive realignment case — a signature in 2018 followed by full LGBTQ-affirming, woman-pastor, social-gospel realignment by 2022. Woodmont Hills Nashville is the Church-of-Christ egalitarian-elder case, doctrinally drifting on leadership rather than on social justice.

The five +N drifters — the churches where the pastor signed both Nashville and Dallas and the congregation has nevertheless drifted — are the most editorially significant. These are not cases of pastors who signed one statement under social pressure and meant little by it. They are cases where a pastor signed two distinct statements, twelve months apart, on different doctrinal terrain, and the church he led drifted anyway. That fact does not, by itself, indict the original signer; pastoral transitions and denominational shifts happen. But it does sharpen the editorial discipline of not trusting a 2018 signature as a 2026 guarantee.

What the Pairing Tells Us

Read against the Nashville map, the Dallas map tells us something the Nashville map alone could not. Nashville told us where evangelical leaders were willing to draw a line against the cultural drift outside the church. Dallas tells us where evangelical leaders were willing to draw a line against the drift inside the church. The 72 dual-witness pastors are the ones who were willing to do both — to take both the external and the internal cost. That cohort is, in my reading of the data, the cleanest available proxy for "confessional evangelical pastor with a public theological record."

The cohort is also geographically distributed in a way that defies the lazy coastal-elite stereotypes of evangelicalism. Yes, Texas dominates and the Old South is well-represented. But California has 18 Dallas-signer churches, Pennsylvania has 7, New York has at least one (Brooklyn — albeit a drifter), and there are signers in Maine, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The map is real and it is national. What unifies it is not region but institutional formation — most of the dual-witness pastors were trained at one of a small number of confessional seminaries (Southern, Southwestern, Master's, Reformed Theological Seminary, Westminster), or were discipled by a small number of identifiable senior pastors and parachurch leaders whose names recur in the data.

A future installment in this series will draw the synthesis map — all seven ledgers we cross-reference, plotted together, with the overlaps and the drifters and the institutional carriers visible at one glance. The Dallas map is the second piece of that puzzle. The remaining five — Warhurst Protest, AMR Leadership, Letter of Lament, Revoice, CBE Egalitarian Network — each tell their own small story about a different corner of the same institutional landscape. Together they form the picture this directory is, in the end, trying to draw.

The institutional shape of confessional American evangelicalism is not a single church, network, or denomination. It is a coordinated pattern of pastors, seminaries, parachurch organizations, and statement-signature events that recur across decades. Mapping it record by record is slow editorial work. It is also, I think, the work most worth doing.

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.