Can evangelicals attend an inclusive church? Yes, and the question tends to be asked more carefully than it sounds, because the person asking often has more at stake than a Sunday morning.
Sometimes the person asking is evangelical and curious. Sometimes they left years ago and the vocabulary stayed behind in their mouth. Sometimes they have a mother, a brother, an entire side of a family still fully inside it, and they are trying to work out whether walking in here amounts to declaring a side.
It does not.
Can evangelicals attend an inclusive church? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is about what kind of inclusive church is doing the welcoming.
Love Above All means refusing the harm without making enemies of the people. Those two are separable, and a church that cannot separate them has a problem it has not noticed yet.
Religious Histories Are Layered, Not Sorted
People who ask can evangelicals attend an inclusive church often assume their own history has to be settled first. The tidy version of leaving says a person recognized the harm and walked out. The actual version is messier, because a place that did damage may well have been doing other things at the same time.
It may have taught you the Bible you can still quote from memory. It may have fed your family through a bad year. It may have provided the only adults outside your house who ever paid close attention to you. And it may have told you things about yourself at fourteen that you are still dismantling in your forties.
Both columns are real. People arrive here trying to decide which column the whole thing goes in, as though the accounting has to be closed before they are allowed to move.
It does not have to be closed. Some people do hold a serious grievance and a real gratitude toward the same institution at once, and find that neither one cancels the other.
And for some people there is nothing in the second column worth keeping. The harm was the substance of it, and being asked to locate the good parts is one more demand from an institution that has already made enough of them. That is a complete and honest account too. Complexity is available here, not required.
Can Evangelicals Attend an Inclusive Church? Only If It Does Not Run on Contempt
This is where I want to be direct, because it is the easiest failure available to a church like this one, and because it is the real answer to the question can evangelicals attend an inclusive church.
There is a version of an inclusive church that runs on being the opposite of somewhere else. Its identity is a comparison. It knows precisely what it is not, and it keeps that clarity in working order by maintaining a nearby enemy.
That is a functioning business model and it is not a gospel. It produces people who are fluent about what is wrong with other Christians and vague about what they themselves are for. It also feels excellent, which is the actual danger, because contempt is the most satisfying counterfeit of moral seriousness on offer.
We do not heal from exclusion by becoming better at excluding.
In practice that means you will not be asked to hold your family in contempt as the price of belonging here. A church that requires you to despise the people you came from in order to count as one of us is running the same operation you left, with a different roster.
You can conclude that a theology is wrong and that it does damage. That is a judgment about ideas, and you are entitled to it. Deciding that the people who hold it are therefore stupid or wicked is a separate move, and the first one does not require the second.
The Vocabulary Takes a While
You may still talk like where you came from. That is not a problem here, and it is worth saying out loud, because people write to me about it.
Perhaps you still say quiet time, or walk with the Lord, or on fire, or unsaved, or the enemy, or whatever phrase you were handed for what happened to you at camp when you were twelve. Some of that language is precise and genuinely beautiful and has no adequate replacement. Some of it carries assumptions you have stopped holding, and you will notice which is which on your own schedule rather than mine.
The other half of this problem is that the new vocabulary does not get handed to you either. There is a whole set of words used comfortably in churches like this one that can feel like a language exam you were never told about. If a word here is unfamiliar, ask what it means. Not knowing is ordinary and asking costs you nothing.
And the old words can stay if they still work. I know people here who pray in the cadence they learned in a place they would never go back to.
Agreement Is Not the Price of Dignity
So let me answer the question plainly. Can evangelicals attend an inclusive church? At this one, yes, and evangelical people are welcome here. Not as projects, not as recruits, and not as case studies in something we are relieved to have escaped.
That includes the visiting parent who thinks this church is wrong about several important things and came anyway because their kid asked. It includes the person still fully inside it who is looking around quietly and is not ready to say why. It includes the spouse who comes to sit beside someone they love and does not agree with a word of it.
Can evangelicals attend an inclusive church? It comes down to this. Agreement is not the entry requirement for dignity, and a church that made it one would have to start removing its own members to stay consistent.
So come as you actually are, including the parts that still sound like where you came from. Nothing about being evangelical, formerly evangelical, or undecided disqualifies anyone from an inclusive church that means what it says. Erasing your history is not a prerequisite for finding out where love might be going.
The next post is for people whose religious story does not sort into a category at all.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and what Christianity can become when love matters more than certainty.
If you are looking for a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and you do not have to pretend to have everything figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All