Twenty minutes outside downtown Atlanta, Vinings Lake sits along a humming thoroughfare connecting Veterans Memorial Highway to the affluent suburbs north of the city. With its white steeple and brick exterior, it could easily be mistaken for another Southern Baptist church adorning America’s Bible Belt.
But façade aside, the community no longer thinks of itself strictly as a church.
“We’re an ever-evolving spiritual collective,” the pastor, Cody Deese, said to those gathered in the dimly lit sanctuary on a rainy Sunday in early December. “If you’re a Christian, wonderful. If you’re post-Christian, wonderful.”
Vinings Lake is one of a handful of spiritual communities across the U.S. sprouting from the soil of the exvangelical and deconstruction movements. While their Sunday morning gatherings retain the basic structure of many Christian services — music, teachings, fellowship — these collectives reject dogma, prefer questions over answers and have no intention of converting anybody to anything. Here, LGBTQ inclusion is not up for debate, people of all and no faiths are welcome and Jesus can be a savior, a radical rabbi or a metaphor, depending on your spiritual inclination.
Though they are few, these communities are also emblematic of a larger groundswell of spiritual “nones” searching for new forms of ritual and belonging.
“There’s something reaching a critical mass,” said Kevin Miguel Garcia, spiritual coach and author of “What Makes You Bloom: Cultivating a Practice for Connecting With Your Divine Self.” “There’s a desire growing within people to figure out how to live meaningfully even without traditional structures. How do I live justly without baptizing myself into a faith? How do I love my neighbor, without having to proof text it with a Bible verse?”
In many ways, the evolution of Vinings Lake mirrors the spiritual path of its current pastor. Deese delivered his first sermon at age 16 and was groomed to follow the vocational footsteps of his father, a Southern Baptist pastor. But in his early 20s, he struggled to reconcile his notion of a loving God with the doctrine of hell.

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Kathryn Post| “Church for ‘nones’: Meet the anti-dogma spiritual collectives emerging across the US” | December 20, 2023

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