Records where the editorial signals are in tension — pastors whose public theological positions point in opposite directions, churches where a 2017 conviction may no longer describe a 2026 reality, ratings that predate the current rubric. This is the ledger of what we are actively monitoring.
Drift is not a single phenomenon. In this directory, it has at least five distinct shapes — each surfaced as its own bucket below.
A pastor who signed the Nashville Statement in 2017 and then signed the Warhurst Protest in 2020 has not necessarily moved positions — but his signatures point in opposite directions, and the tension deserves a closer look. A church whose pastor signed Nashville but which now rates red is a 2017-2026 trajectory that may reflect a leadership transition, a denominational drift, or a quiet realignment. A church rated green where a staff member signed a soft-progressive PCA letter may be a rating that hasn't caught up to the new evidence — or it may be a legitimate single-staff outlier. Each bucket has a different explanation, and each warrants a different follow-up.
This page is the editorial honesty layer. A directory that doesn't surface its own internal tensions is not a directory anyone should trust. These records are exactly the ones where our rating, our cross-references, or our research are doing the hardest work — and they are exactly the ones a careful reader should examine for themselves.
Each of these churches has staff or pastoral leadership who signed at least one green-direction statement (Nashville 2017 or Dallas 2018) and at least one red-direction statement (Warhurst, AMR, Letter of Lament, Revoice, or CBE). The most common pairing is Nashville 2017 × Warhurst Protest 2020 — pastors who held the 2017 line on biblical sexuality but later signed the 2020 protest against PCA discipline of a Revoice-friendly minister. That combination is not a clean contradiction (a man can hold both positions in principle), but it is a meaningful tension worth flagging.
Pastors or staff who signed the Nashville Statement, the Dallas Statement, or both — but whose church currently rates red or black in our rubric. The drift drivers vary: leadership transitions (the signer retired, moved, or died and a successor pastors differently), denominational drift (church called a female pastor or adopted egalitarian leadership), mission drift (prosperity-adjacent teaching, ministry collapse, full progressive realignment). For the editorial narrative around this bucket, see the "Where the Nashville Statement Signers Lead Today" blog post.
Pastors or staff who signed a red-direction statement (most commonly the Warhurst Protest) but whose church currently rates green in our rubric. These records are stale-rating candidates. Possible explanations: a single staff signature on a multi-staff church (the senior pastor may hold a different line), the church has since corrected and the signature is historical context only, or our rubric rating is out of date. Each of these warrants a fresh look at the church's current statement of faith, current preaching, and current elder team.
Churches with two or more total signer entries across the ledgers but rated red or black. The "two or more" threshold is what makes this bucket distinct from the simpler green-signer-drift bucket above: a church with multiple signature entries was, at one point, a significant institutional carrier of public theological statements. If it has drifted, the drift is correspondingly more significant. These records get manual review priority.
373 records still carry a numeric overall_rating (e.g. 6, 7, 8.5) — a holdover from an earlier 1-10 scoring scheme that predates the current categorical rubric (green / yellow / red / black / dead). These records are not unrated; they are differently rated, on a scheme that the current public methodology no longer documents. They will be re-evaluated against the categorical rubric in a future enrichment pass.
The legacy ratings concentrate in specific denominational families that received bulk-import enrichment under the older scoring model:
In the meantime, any user-facing rating display for these records uses the literal numeric value rather than mapping it onto the categorical scale — the rubric translation is intentionally deferred until a human review pass can confirm each record individually. For one-off corrections, use the feedback form on the relevant church profile page.
Drift detection runs against the live docs/data/churches.json file every time scripts/build-directory-drift.js is invoked. The script reads ledger directions from docs/data/statement-lists-manifest.json — green-direction ledgers (Nashville Statement 2017, Dallas Statement 2018) and red-direction ledgers (Warhurst Protest 2020, AMR Leadership 2026, PCA Letter of Lament 2025, Revoice 2018–2026, CBE Egalitarian Network 2026) are tagged in the manifest itself rather than hardcoded.
A record can appear in multiple buckets — a heavy signer at a drifted church may show up in both the green-signer-drift bucket and the high-sigs-low-rating bucket, and that's intentional. Buckets are perspectives, not categories.
If you believe a record on this page has been misclassified, or you can correct a stale rating with primary-source evidence (statement of faith URL, sermon timestamp, denominational announcement), please submit the correction via the feedback form on the individual church's profile page. The directory's editorial discipline is to accept evidence-bearing corrections within one enrichment cycle.
A drift listing is not an accusation. It is a signal that the record's editorial confidence is lower than the directory's median — that the available evidence does not all point in the same direction. Some of these records will resolve toward green on closer examination; some will resolve toward red. The point of the watchlist is to make the unresolved cases visible rather than to bury them inside a confident-looking aggregate.