A friend shared a post about a believer who has decided to stop calling herself an evangelical repudiating the evangelicals who support the government and its sunshine policy of EJK. She says she is now an exvangelical but she will “keep” her relationship with Christ.

The term “exvangelical” was coined in the West as institutions started dropping the word “evangelical” from their identity claiming that it has come to be associated with being a Trump supporter.  

According to Urban Dictionary, an exvangelical is a “person who has left the Evangelical Christian movement. This includes people who have left to more progressive Christian denominations as well as those who have left Christianity all together.”

If our sister is keeping her relationship, then she is not leaving Christianity all together so is she joining its progressive branch? 

A progressive Christian is someone who has “religious interests and longings but cannot accept the beliefs and dogmas” and are “repelled by claims that Christianity is the ‘only way.’”

And then to be exvangelical means to embrace a biblically unacceptable lifestyle. This is the case of a professing believer who has chosen “to let go of reading the Bible literally” and leave an “authoritarian leadership” with its “indoctrinated beliefs.” She has now found “joy” and “delight” now that she is free from the “toxic faith” box that she says evangelicals have put God in.

I don’t know how well our sister understands the term “exvangelical” but from my surface-level research, I hope she peels it off. The label has yet to be fully defined. At its infantile stage, it is still developing and might later be associated with things that she does not stand for. I understand her pain at seeing fist bumps from fellow believers but why leave the faith because of them? We do not follow people, we follow Jesus. It was not Jesus who pained her, it was her fellow followers. Instead of changing name tags, it is best that we bring it to the Lord and wait upon Him.  

As for our brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we have political differences, surely we can find other things to be in agreement with for the sake of the kingdom? I found this to be true at the height of the donation drive for frontliners and the victims of Typhoon Ulysses last year. I did not ask my donors and sponsors what their political color was and neither did they. We just did what needed to be done to help the sick, the poor, and the needy. Let us leave it to God to judge us for our stance and let not politics distract us from ministry or worse, make us take a detour from the Way.