Where the Nashville Statement Signers Lead Today

In August 2017 a coalition of evangelical leaders — Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood at its center, Russell Moore and John Piper and Albert Mohler and Ligon Duncan among the prominent original signers — released a fourteen-article confession on biblical sexuality. They called it the Nashville Statement. It was not subtle. It affirmed the goodness of God's design for sexuality as male and female, the exclusivity of marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman, and the impossibility of any "gay Christian" identity that treated same-sex sexual desire as morally neutral. It was, in the cultural language of the moment, a line in the sand — and within hours of its release, the people drawing red ink on the other side of that line were already publishing their rebuttals.

Nine years later, the question that interests me is a different one. Not who signed it — that list is public and has been picked over endlessly by both supporters and critics — but rather: where do the signers actually pastor today? What does the map look like when you cross-reference every Nashville Statement signer against the working evangelical church directory we've been building for the past year? Which congregations are they shepherding nine years on? In what regions are they concentrated? In what denominations? And — the question I think matters most — which signers are leading churches whose doctrinal posture has since shifted in ways the 2017 line in the sand might not predict?

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone has tried to draw that map. So I drew it. Here is what it says.

What the Nashville Statement Was, Briefly

For anyone reading this who was not paying attention to the inside-baseball of American evangelicalism in late 2017: the Nashville Statement was a fourteen-article document drafted under the auspices of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). Its drafters framed it as the evangelical answer to the cultural collapse of marriage and biblical sexuality — a confession a man could either sign or not sign, and signing meant something. Article 10, the most contested, declared that to "approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism" constituted "an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness." That is, this is not a secondary issue. Get this one wrong and you are no longer holding Christian ground.

The statement attracted roughly 22,000 signatures in its first months — pastors, scholars, denominational executives, ministry leaders, and laypeople. It also attracted immediate and predictable backlash: the mayor of Nashville denounced it (the statement was named for its drafting location, not for any institutional Nashville endorsement); progressive denominations issued counter-statements; and even some center-evangelical voices objected to its tone or timing. The signers held the line anyway.

A statement of faith is cheap when it costs you nothing. The Nashville Statement cost some signers staff positions, denominational standing, and friendships. That sorting is exactly why the map nine years later is worth drawing.

Three Hundred Churches Across Thirty-Eight States

Our directory currently holds 13,895 evangelical congregations in the United States, of which 296 are pastored or staffed by at least one publicly identified Nashville Statement signer. That's 2.1% of the directory — a smaller number than I expected before running the join, and for a reason that becomes clear once you look at the geography. The signers are not evenly distributed. They cluster, hard, in specific regions and specific denominations, and the clustering tells a real story.

Texas is the gravitational center. Fifty-eight churches in Texas alone — nearly one in five of the entire national map — have a Nashville signer in leadership. The next four states combined (Virginia 28, California 23, Florida 22, Tennessee 20) account for 93 churches together, still less than Texas plus one mid-sized neighbor. The Southeast and South-Central regions hold the overwhelming weight of the map: add North Carolina (14), South Carolina (12), Mississippi (9), Georgia (8), Alabama (8), Louisiana (7), and Oklahoma (7), and you have the Bible Belt accounting for nearly half of all signer-pastored churches in the country.

But the map is not exclusively Southern. New York has 5. Pennsylvania has 8. Ohio has 4. Colorado has 4. Indiana has 6. Kentucky has 6. There is a thin but real presence in the Mountain West (Arizona 5, Idaho 3, Montana 2), and a thin but real presence in the Pacific Northwest (Washington 1, Oregon 1). California's 23 is the most striking statistic in the dataset — that's twenty-three congregations in the most progressive state in the union whose pastors put their names on Article 10 in 2017 and are still pastoring. That number is the kind of thing you only see if you actually count.

Why Texas, and Why Virginia

The Texas concentration is not a fluke. It reflects four overlapping institutional realities: Dallas Theological Seminary's century of doctrinal output, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, the unusual density of Reformed Baptist and Sovereign Grace congregations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and the sheer scale of the SBC's Texas presence — the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention and Baptist General Convention of Texas together pastor more confessional Baptist congregations than most entire states contain. Of the 58 Texas churches with signers, the heaviest urban clusters are Dallas (5), Houston (5), Fort Worth (5), Prosper (4), Frisco (4), Plano (3), and Flower Mound (3). The DFW metroplex alone holds twenty-four of them. That is not a region picking up signers by accident. That is a region that built the institutional infrastructure those signers were trained in.

Virginia at 28 is the more interesting story, because Virginia is not a doctrinal heavyweight in the way Texas is. What Virginia has is geography: Liberty University and Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, the dense Northern Virginia evangelical corridor (Manassas, Springfield, Alexandria, Centreville), and a long thread of independent Baptist and Free Will Baptist congregations through the Shenandoah Valley and the Tidewater. Lynchburg alone contributes a half-dozen of the 28; Northern Virginia contributes a similar number. The remaining cluster is scattered across Spotsylvania, Charlottesville, Richmond, and the Tidewater. As someone pastoring in Fredericksburg, I find this distribution very recognizable — the signers in my state are exactly the men I would have predicted, in exactly the cities I would have predicted.

California's 23 is a third pattern: not a regional cluster but a strand. The signers are scattered across the state, not concentrated in a metro. What they share is institutional independence — most are non-denominational, Reformed Baptist, or Sovereign Grace congregations that did not need denominational permission to take the position they took. That kind of independence is exactly the kind of structure that survives in a hostile cultural environment, because the cost of holding the line is not paid by an entire denominational apparatus but by individual congregations that already counted that cost.

The Denominational Map

The Southern Baptist Convention dominates this map at 127 of the 296 churches — that's 43%, which mirrors the SBC's overall share of the original Nashville signers list. Non-denominational congregations hold the second slot at 50, and the various Presbyterian-Reformed bodies together (PCA, URCNA, EPC, ARP, OPC, BPC) account for 35. The Reformed Baptist and Sovereign Grace Churches together hold 34, and Acts 29 holds 9. What this list essentially shows is the institutional shape of the confessional evangelical center in America in 2026 — a Southern Baptist core, a Reformed Presbyterian outer ring, a Reformed Baptist density that punches above its size, and a long tail of smaller bodies including Anabaptist, Anglican, Lutheran, Free Will Baptist, and several smaller Reformed traditions.

What is conspicuously absent? The mainline Protestant denominations. There is one PCUSA-adjacent Presbyterian church, no UMC churches, no ELCA churches, no Episcopal Church (TEC) churches, and no UCC or Disciples of Christ churches with a publicly identified Nashville signer in leadership. This is not surprising — the Nashville Statement was, in part, a statement that drew a line specifically against the trajectory those denominations had taken — but seeing the absence quantified is still striking. The pastors who signed are concentrated in the bodies that did not move, and the bodies that moved have no signers.

The Dual-Witness Pattern

One of the most interesting findings in the dataset is what I'm calling the dual-witness pattern: pastors who did not sign just the Nashville Statement, but went back and signed additional public theological statements when subsequent occasions arose. Eighty of the 296 churches — more than a quarter — fit this profile. Most paired the Nashville Statement with the Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel (2018), a similar but distinct line-in-the-sand confession addressing the critical-theory drift in evangelical institutions. A smaller number signed Nashville plus the Warhurst Protest (2020, against the proposed PCA bylaws revision that would have created institutional ambiguity around same-sex-attracted-but-celibate pastors). A handful signed Nashville plus the Letter of Lament (2025, on SBC sexual-abuse accountability).

The dual-witness pastors are a self-selected subset of the original Nashville signers — the men who, when subsequent confessional moments arose, did not stay quiet. A pastor who signs one public statement might be sincere; a pastor who signs three or four is demonstrating an institutional pattern. He is willing to put his name to the line repeatedly, and to do so even when the price of doing so was already known from the first signing. This is the subset of the signer list that I find most pastorally interesting, because it surfaces the pastors who treat public confession as a recurring obligation rather than a one-time event.

Among the green-rated dual-witness churches in the directory: Covenant Bible Church (North Georgetown, TX), Heritage Baptist Church (Lynchburg, VA), Pillar Church at Locust Grove (VA), Calvary Chapel Manassas (VA), Hyland Heights Baptist Church (Lynchburg, VA), KingsWay Community Church Midlothian (VA), and Providence Mennonite Church (VA). The pattern is clear — when a pastor signs three of these statements, the church he leads almost always rates green in our overall scorecard. Not because the signatures cause the rating, but because the same posture that produces the signatures produces the rating.

The Drifters

Now the part of the map that I think matters most. Seventeen of the 296 Nashville-signer churches in our directory are rated red or black — not green, not yellow, but explicit warnings. These are congregations whose pastor or a member of the pastoral team signed the Nashville Statement in 2017, but where the church's current doctrinal posture, leadership structure, or denominational alignment has moved in ways that no longer match the line that statement drew.

The drift patterns vary. Some are leadership transitions — the original signer has retired, moved, or died, and the church has called a successor whose theology runs a different direction. Some are denominational drift — a Southern Baptist congregation that has not formally left the SBC but has quietly adopted egalitarian leadership, or a Presbyterian congregation that has called a female pastor since 2017. Some are mission drift — Mount Paran's slide into prosperity-adjacent teaching, IHOPKC's institutional collapse after the 2024 Mike Bickle allegations, Forefront Brooklyn's full progressive realignment. Some are doctrinal drift unrelated to sexuality — Woodmont Hills' egalitarian elder structure, for instance, which has nothing to do with the 2017 Nashville Statement but everything to do with biblical leadership.

What the drifters list does not mean: it does not mean those original signers were insincere in 2017. It also does not mean every red or black rating is the fault of the signer specifically. The 2017 line in the sand was a real one, but a signature is a moment, and a pastoral calling is a decade. People retire. Churches transition. Cultures shift faster than any one document can hold a line against. What the drifters list does mean is this: if a family was choosing a church in 2018 on the strength of the pastor's Nashville signature alone, they made a real decision based on real evidence at the time. If that family is still attending that church in 2026 without re-evaluating, they may be assuming a continuity that no longer exists.

A doctrinal commitment made in 2017 does not automatically describe a doctrinal reality in 2026. The Nashville Statement marked who was willing to draw a line on a specific August day nine years ago. It did not — and could not — bind anyone to keep standing on that line forever.

What the Map Actually Tells Us

The 296 churches on this map are not a comprehensive directory of confessional evangelicalism in America. They are, narrowly, the congregations where the working evangelical church directory we have built can identify at least one publicly-named Nashville Statement signer in current leadership. That is a real signal but a narrow one. A church not on this map is not by that fact alone a church to avoid, and a church on this map is not by that fact alone a church to recommend.

What the map tells us, instead, is something about the institutional shape of the confessional center: where it concentrates, what it pastors out of, which regional clusters carry it, and where it has held over time. The Southern Baptist density, the Texas anchor, the surprising Virginia presence, the thin but persistent California strand, the dual-witness pattern, and the seventeen drifters — taken together, these are the contours of a posture that has held for almost a decade in a period when many posture-holders have moved.

It also tells us something about method. Pastoral signatures are not the only signal worth tracking, and we don't treat them that way in the directory. But they are a real signal — one of seven public theological ledgers we cross-reference against every church in our database — and they are a signal that costs the signer something. A pastor who put his name to the Nashville Statement in August 2017 did not do it to score points with the secular press, with progressive denominational committees, or with most evangelical institutions of higher education. He did it because he believed the moment required it. Nine years later, the question of where he is shepherding now is one of the cleaner signals available to a family trying to make a serious choice about where their children will spend Sunday morning for the next twenty years.

How to Use This Data

Every one of these 296 churches has a profile page in the directory. You can browse them filtered by the network cross-reference page, drill into denominational subsets, or read the methodology behind the entire scoring system on the methodology page. If you find a church on this map that has drifted in a direction our scorecard doesn't reflect, the individual church profile pages each have a feedback form — send us the correction and we will update the entry. We have done this dozens of times already over the past year, and we will keep doing it.

If you are looking for a church and your current options include one of the 296, this map is one data point among several. It is not the whole story. A pastor's 2017 signature does not promise his current preaching, his current elder team, his current discipleship structure, or his current view on any number of secondary issues. But it is a piece of historical evidence about what he was willing to say publicly when saying it cost something — and that is the kind of evidence worth weighing carefully alongside the rest.

The most important question a church directory can answer is not who was right yesterday. It is who is still right today, and who is still standing on the same ground he was standing on when the line was first drawn. The map of where the Nashville signers pastor today is one good answer to that question — among several.

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.