Where the Warhurst Protesters Lead Today

In December 2020, while the rest of American evangelicalism was watching the SBC implode over Resolution 9 and the November election, a quieter but in some ways more institutionally revealing event took place inside the Presbyterian Church in America. The Missouri Presbytery had declined to discipline Greg Johnson — pastor of Memorial Presbyterian in St. Louis, openly same-sex-attracted-but-celibate, a leading platform voice in the Revoice conferences, and the most visible PCA-Side-B figure of the previous half-decade. TE Stephen Warhurst, working with a coalition of conservative Reformed pastors, filed a formal protest against the Presbytery's decision. The protest cited specific theological objections to Greg Johnson's public theology — that "gay Christian" was an identity-marker rather than a moral category, that "Side B" celibacy was framed as a fundamentally Christian rather than penitential posture, that Revoice's conference culture had blurred the line between same-sex-attracted-but-celibate and same-sex-attracted-and-actively-affirmed.

The protest did not succeed in producing discipline. It did, however, produce something more durable: a public list of pastors and elders willing to sign their names to it. The Warhurst Protest signature list was compiled at warhornmedia.com and has been called, in conservative-Reformed shorthand ever since, the PCA Hall of Infamy — although that framing inverts the original signers' intent. To the conservative wing of the PCA, the list reads as a roll of pastors willing to draw a doctrinal line. To the soft-progressive wing, the same list reads as a register of who was willing to formally protest a Presbytery's gracious treatment of a brother in Christ. The same names appear on both readings. Which reading you find more compelling tells you which wing of the PCA you sit closer to.

Six years later, the question I want to answer is the same one we asked of the Nashville Statement and Dallas Statement signers: where do the Warhurst Protest signers actually pastor today? The answer is a different shape than the Nashville and Dallas answers — denser denominationally, smaller numerically, and pointing in the opposite editorial direction. This essay is the red mirror of the previous two. Where Nashville and Dallas mapped pastors holding a conservative line, Warhurst maps pastors protesting on the soft-progressive side of the same denomination. Reading both maps together tells you something neither map tells alone.

What the Warhurst Protest Was

The December 2020 protest was a formal document filed with the General Assembly of the PCA following the Missouri Presbytery's adjudication of charges against Greg Johnson. Johnson had been the subject of years of theological controversy in the PCA over his public posture as a celibate gay Christian, his keynote role at Revoice 2018 and 2019, and his interview with Christianity Today the following year. The Missouri Presbytery declined to discipline him. The protest argued that this declination was itself a failure of confessional fidelity — that the issue at stake was not whether Johnson was sincere or celibate (the protesters generally affirmed both), but whether the PCA's confessional standards permit the "gay Christian" identity-marker as a legitimate ongoing posture for an ordained teaching elder.

The 109 signers represented a particular institutional cohort within the PCA: pastors who were willing to formally challenge their own denomination's adjudication, in writing, by name. That kind of signature is materially different from a Nashville or Dallas signature, because it is a signature against a peer denomination's specific decision rather than against a cultural drift in the wider church. The cost of signing was therefore institutional — strained relationships within Presbytery, lost denominational committee assignments, sometimes lost church-planting partnerships. Some signers paid that cost more visibly than others. Six years on, this is the cohort I want to map.

A protest signature inside your own denomination costs more than a statement signature against the wider culture. It names the people whose loyalty to the confession out-weighed their loyalty to the institutional peace of the denominational committee.

Seventy-Eight Churches, Eighty-Seven Percent PCA

Of the 13,900 churches in our working directory, 78 have at least one publicly identified Warhurst Protest signer in current leadership. That's 0.6% of the directory — a much smaller share than either Nashville (2.1%) or Dallas (1.2%). The lower share is partly a function of the protest's narrower target audience (PCA pastors specifically, rather than the broader evangelical world) and partly a function of the higher cost of the signature itself (an internal-denominational protest is more institutionally expensive than a public statement aimed outside the church).

The denominational concentration is the most striking statistic in the entire dataset: 75 of 78 Warhurst churches are PCA (96% if you combine the variant denomination labels in the directory — "Presbyterian (PCA)", "PCA", and so on). The protest was, in effect, an intra-PCA event with very minor SBC-Reformed and Acts-29 fringe participation. That concentration is what makes the Warhurst map editorially useful: unlike Nashville (which sprawled across SBC, Reformed Baptist, Non-Denominational, and various Presbyterian bodies), Warhurst lets us look at one denomination's internal fault line in isolation. It is a unique opportunity to map a single denomination's institutional geometry without the noise of other bodies' politics interfering.

Geography of the Soft-Progressive PCA Wing

The Warhurst signers cluster around urban PCA centers in a way that closely tracks the broader PCA-progressive institutional infrastructure (Memorial Presbyterian St. Louis, Redeemer New York and Redeemer's plant network, Covenant Theological Seminary, the Christ Presbyterian Music Row cluster in Nashville).

Texas leads at 10 churches, then California at 8, Tennessee 6, North Carolina 6, Virginia 5, and a cluster of mid-sized states (Florida 4, Missouri 4, Oklahoma 4, Colorado 4, Ohio 4). The Texas leadership is not the same Texas as the Nashville Statement's: Nashville-Texas was Dallas-Fort Worth Reformed Baptist; Warhurst-Texas is a different Reformed corridor that runs through Lubbock (Providence Presbyterian), Fort Worth (Trinity Presbyterian Church Fort Worth, the densest single Warhurst signer church in our data with three confirmed entries), Cedar Park (Emmanuel Presbyterian), Colleyville (Colleyville Presbyterian), Denton (Denton Presbyterian), Dallas (New St. Peter's), San Antonio (Trinity Grace), San Angelo (The Heights Church), and the Houston metroplex (Bellaire's Christ the King Presbyterian, Midlothian's Christ the King). These are PCA congregations of varying size, almost all in the Reformed-urban professional-class niche that has been the PCA's institutional core for two decades.

California's 8 Warhurst signer churches are scattered across the state (Fullerton's New Life Presbyterian of Orange County, Santa Barbara's Christ Presbyterian, Paso Robles' Covenant Presbyterian, San Jose's Grace South Bay, Long Beach's King's Church, Irvine's New Life Church, Lomita's Redeemer Presbyterian, Roseville's Valley Springs Presbyterian). They are not concentrated in any single metro — what unifies them is their PCA affiliation in a state where conservative PCA congregations are increasingly thin. Their presence on the Warhurst list reflects the soft-progressive wing's particular institutional weight inside California PCA specifically.

Tennessee at 6, with two Nashville-metro congregations (Independent Presbyterian Memphis, Christ Presbyterian Nashville) and a cluster around Reformed University Fellowship at Belmont University, is the Music-Row-and-Belmont-University cohort — a younger, urban, professionally-employed PCA niche with substantial overlap with the campus-ministry infrastructure that has historically funneled into Covenant Theological Seminary.

The Contradictory Eleven

The single most editorially important pattern in the Warhurst dataset is what I'm going to call the contradictory eleven: eleven churches whose leadership signed both the 2017 Nashville Statement (conservative, biblical sexuality) and the 2020 Warhurst Protest (protesting PCA discipline of a Revoice-friendly minister). On the surface these are opposing positions. In practice they are held simultaneously, and the people holding them are real pastors leading real congregations.

How do you read this list? Not as a list of hypocrites. The people whose names appear on both lists almost without exception understand themselves as having signed two consistent positions: Nashville said "yes, the biblical sexual ethic remains binding"; Warhurst said "we believe Missouri Presbytery's specific handling of a specific minister failed to apply that ethic confessionally." A person can hold both sincerely. The question is whether the institutional posture of a church whose pastor holds both is more like the Nashville-pure cohort or more like the Warhurst-pure cohort. The data suggests it is somewhere in the middle — every one of the contradictory eleven rates yellow in our overall directory, not green and not red. They are the structural ambiguity at the heart of the PCA today.

Trinity Presbyterian Fort Worth, with three confirmed Warhurst signers and one Nashville signer, is the densest example. Kindred Hope (PCA plant) Atlanta goes further — it carries signatures across Nashville, Dallas, Warhurst, AMR Leadership, and the Letter of Lament. Five distinct ledgers, three pointing in conservative directions and two pointing in soft-progressive directions. That is the geometry of the PCA's contested center.

The contradictory eleven are not pastors of inconsistency. They are pastors of a coherent third position — affirm the sexual ethic, contest the specific disciplinary application. Whether that third position is sustainable as a long-term confessional posture is the open question the next decade of PCA history will answer.

The Five Still-Green Stragglers

Five churches in the Warhurst dataset currently rate green in our directory's overall scorecard despite having a Warhurst signer in confirmed leadership. These records are explicitly flagged on our drift watchlist as stale-rating candidates — the editorial signals are in tension and the rating may need an updated look.

Each of these warrants a manual review pass. The most likely explanations: (a) the Warhurst signature came from a single staff member rather than the senior pastor, and the church's overall theological posture remains conservative; (b) the church has since transitioned leadership and the signer is no longer there; (c) our overall scorecard is genuinely behind the times and the rating should move from green to yellow. In every case the right response is to look at the individual church's profile page, read the available evidence, and submit a correction if the data warrants it. That is precisely the editorial loop the directory is designed to support.

What the Map Shows About the PCA's Internal Geometry

Read against the Nashville and Dallas maps, the Warhurst map tells us something neither could tell alone. Nashville mapped the conservative side of the wider evangelical world. Dallas refined that map by narrowing to the cohort that also lined up against critical-theory drift inside the church. Warhurst, finally, narrows further — to the cohort inside one specific denomination that was willing to formally protest its own Presbytery's adjudication. The three maps together describe three concentric circles of institutional commitment.

Most of the Warhurst signers do not appear on the Nashville map. Most of the Nashville map's PCA representation does not appear on the Warhurst map. The 11-church overlap (the contradictory eleven) is the small but institutionally crucial intersection. The 67 churches that appear on the Warhurst map but not on Nashville are a distinct cohort: pastors who were willing to protest the Greg Johnson decision but not willing — or not asked, depending on personal history — to put their name on the broader Nashville Statement. They are the PCA's institutional middle: confessionally conservative on sexual ethics in actual pastoral practice, but politically distinct from the SBC-and-Reformed-Baptist-led Nashville coalition.

This is what the synthesis essay — the forthcoming 7-Ledger Map — will lay out in full. The Warhurst data is the third piece of that puzzle. Reading the three maps together (Nashville, Dallas, Warhurst) already gives a reader a substantially clearer picture of who pastors what, where, and within what institutional cohort, than any single confession-watch tool I have ever encountered.

The PCA's internal geometry is not "conservative versus progressive." It is "Nashville-cohort versus Warhurst-cohort versus middle-eleven-cohort." Three distinct postures, all confessing the Westminster Standards, all pastoring real congregations in 2026. The map is the only way to see them as the distinct institutional cohorts they actually are.

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.