Can Progressive Christianity Speak with Conviction?

Formation, Clarity, and Spiritual Gravity in the Modern Church

Disillusioned but Still Seeking

My ex-husband once asked me a question I have since heard from many spiritually restless adults.

“I want to know the truth about God,” he said. “Just tell me the answer.”

He had been raised by an aunt and uncle in a Franco-American farming community, three miles from the Quebec border. His aunt had been a novice nun before leaving to marry; even outside the order she maintained the practice of six hours of daily prayer, on her knees. She ensured everyone in her large household clambered into the painter’s van that served as a family car and delivered them to church in town for every Sunday. God and all the stories that children are taught in Sunday school formed the warp and weft of his childhood. 

When his father remarried, he returned to live in the city with siblings whom he hardly remembered, plus three step-siblings he’d never met. No one in that household was religious. While no one openly ridiculed faith, it was simply ignored. When he hit his teen years and those narratives stopped feeling credible, he discarded them. No one around him was able to shepherd him into a more mature form of the faith. When he outgrew the Sunday school version of his tradition, he had nothing left. 

He wasn’t, however, indifferent.  

“I miss God,” he said. “I wish I could convince myself, or trick myself, but I just can’t believe a lie.” A hole opened in him that spirituality used to fill.

He’s not alone. I’ve met so many others with the same hunger, mourning for the church they lost. 

Most of these didn’t leave because they stopped believing, but because they could no longer reconcile their faith with their church’s institutional posture. Questions of sexuality, women’s equality, reproductive ethics, or immigration proved to be boulders in the road — mudslides making it impossible for them to follow the road their congregation, church, or denomination expected them to follow.

For them, departure was not about theology but morality — their own understanding of compassion and agape love. Like my ex, they missed transcendence but were unwilling to return to a system that was, they felt, leading in the wrong direction.

This describes a growing number of intellectually serious adults —people who are mourning the tradition they’ve lost, but see no viable alternative. This is when they give up. 

They become refugees, “Nones,” the spiritually unhoused. 

The Two Inadequate Responses

Are there no alternatives for these seekers? It often seems so, because just two familiar patterns of speech dominate the Christian landscape.

In some faith communities, the language is declarative and boundary-conscious. Theology, moral lines and authority are stated clearly. For those who inhabit that world, the coherence can feel stabilizing. These groups are easily identifiable because statements like, “our members are expected to believe…” followed by long statements of theology hold a prominent place on their websites.

In other communities, the language shifts. Emphasis falls on welcome, inclusion, service, and exploration. The tone softens. “Come as you are, whoever you are, whatever you believe” is on the main page. The door is open, but there’s no obvious discussion of what’s waiting inside.

Neither pattern exists as a strategy; rather, both arise organically from deeply held convictions. Neither seems appealing to the spiritually unhoused. They’ve already seen how clarity can harden into enforcement, how it becomes coercive, even exclusionary. They’re equally suspicious of openness, which, when it avoids naming transcendence, it begin to sound like simple civic virtue.

A Moment of Tension

I’m happy housed in a progressive congregation of both heart at depth. Recently, however, during a membership ceremony at my church, I felt this tension.

Eleven new members stood before the congregation. They had attended meetings, discerned carefully, chosen to join. This was a heartfelt, beautiful moment. As our pastor blessed and introduced them, there were many words about community, belonging, and service. Only once, near the end, was God mentioned almost as an afterthought, or a hashtag.

Even I felt a flicker of unease…and I love this church.

Nothing said was untrue or wrong, but the language felt indistinguishable from that of a well-run nonprofit.

In trying not to overstate certainty or tell members what to believe, progressive churches like ours tend to understate transcendence. It’s not that we don’t have it, but rather that we don’t talk about it openly, casually, publicly. 

Our fear of sounding like televangelists has driven us to hide our light under a bushel, to the detriment of those who are seek, but can’t find us.

What Formation Actually Looks Like

Passersby might reasonably assume there’s nothing beyond our welcome sign but platitudes and vacancy. What I know from personal experience within this congregation is exactly the opposite. 

I believe our church produces people who grow into a closer “walk with the Lord” — my phrase, not theirs — through the very practices of community and service that can, at first glance, seem merely civic or superficial. Over time, something happens within congregations like this. A shared rhythm takes hold. The habits of worship, conversation, and service begin to create momentum — a kind of current that quietly draws people toward what is good, and ultimately toward deeper alignment with God.

Modern readers often search the New Testament for language about “community,” but the text speaks instead of ekklesia— the gathered assembly — and repeatedly addresses believers as adelphoi, brothers and sisters. Christianity began not as an idea but as a way of inhabiting life together.

In this church, I have witnessed a level of brother-and-sister regard that is neither sentimental nor ideological. It is habitual, structured, and has emerged from shared practices sustained over time.

In an age of isolation, such habits are not peripheral to faith. They form its architecture.

Perhaps this is what we are actually building. Not a rhetorical emphasis on Jesus, but a system of life in which his teachings are enacted. Service, in this sense, is not philanthropy. It is formation. It disciplines attention. It redirects desire. It slowly binds us more closely to our neighbors — and, in doing so, to the divine source from which those neighbors come.

Self-selection, or Formation?

I can’t speak to other congregations with authority; I can only describe what I see here. Those who settle into this community over time tend toward intellectual humility, a reluctance to inflame conflict, and a discipline of restraint in an age that rewards outrage. Those who prefer ideological warfare, boundary-marking and Facebook rants usually drift elsewhere.

Is this a matter of self-selection, or gradual formation? I’d say it’s a bit of both. Communities shape people, and people choose communities that reinforce their instincts.

The result is visible. 

We’re not perfect, and issues arise among us from time to time; however, the general trend of our progressive church is toward agape love. It’s people don’t orient themselves toward winning arguments, converting people, or winning culture wars. They focus instead on tangible care — feeding neighbors, supporting families, strengthening the civic fabric of our town without demanding allegiance in return. 

That orientation is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate attempt to embody what Jesus taught, rather than merely defend it.

Conviction Without Coercion

My ex might not believe in God after six months among us, but he would recognize that something non-trivial orders our common life. He would see that our commitments are not merely aesthetic or political, but rooted in practices that bend us toward patience, toward peace, toward love over time. He might resist the metaphysics, but he would respect the seriousness.

And that seriousness is where the question of the future lies.

Progressive Christianity has undertaken necessary work over the past decades. It has dismantled the carrot-and-stick calculus of heaven and hell as behavioral leverage. It has refused to equate moral aggression with spiritual depth. It has disentangled the name of God from ideological tribalism. These were not minor adjustments; they were acts of moral courage.

Yet dismantling inherited certainty inevitably creates a space. If nothing equally substantive is articulated in its place, that space begins to feel like absence rather than maturity.

Institutions don’t collapse because belief vanishes. They drift when the language that names their center grows hesitant. Transcendence becomes implied rather than spoken, assumed rather than described. The center remains, but its gravitational pull weakens in the absence of articulation.

This is precisely what intellectually serious adults detect. They are not seeking rigid systems or hierarchy-approved scripts; many have permanently outgrown those. But neither are they searching for spiritual minimalism. They are looking for coherence — a way of life that can withstand scrutiny because it is ordered around something ultimate.

Conviction does not require coercion, and certainty need not collapse into dogmatic enclosure. But a community that cannot name what ultimately orders it will, over time, appear unsure of why it exists.

If progressive Christianity is to speak meaningfully in a post-certainty age, it must learn to articulate its center without reverting to the mechanisms it rightly rejected. It must speak of transcendence without embarrassment and describe transformation not as sentiment, but as disciplined re-formation of the human person.

If it can do that — if it can recover articulate gravity — its future will not depend on reaction or nostalgia. It will endure because it is anchored, and it will command respect because its depth is visible.

What Comes Next

This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of formation, articulation, and the future of progressive Christianity. If these questions matter to you, consider subscribing for future essays and seminar announcements.