Every summer a group of 11 friends and I have a weekend long retreat together. We've known each other since college, when we met through Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We've been in each other's weddings, watched each other become parents, and talked through every issue imaginable; we've done it all, more or less, together. So we now meet yearly, coming together on a Thursday evening and returning to our homes on Saturday afternoon. We love to sing Josh Ritter and Derek Webb songs as well as a selection of old hymns. We also enjoy Woody Allen movies, the comedy of Eddie Izzard the Joss Whedon television show Firefly, The Princess Bride, and V for Vendetta. As a group, we can quote a half-dozen movies beginning to end as well as Eddie Izzard's entire Dress to Kill set.

Of course, when we met in college we didn't set out to define ourselves in these ways—who would? But over time we found a common pleasure in the folk songs and the eclectic mix of movies and TV shows, and it's evolved from there. At this point, after three years of annual gatherings and five years of friendship, they've become an essential part of who we are.

This brings me to Roger Olson's "postconservative evangelicalism." In Olson's reading of our tradition, evangelicalism is a center-set movement (meaning we have a focal point around which we orbit, but no defined parameters fencing us in). To Olson, this is an almost unambiguously good thing. In his view, it's less important to draw lines and more important to emphasize general commonalities and to extend a great deal of grace on matters outside those core beliefs. When we start drawing more boundaries we tend to go astray.

My own experience, however, suggests that such an approach is unrealistic and actually destructive of true community. While the center-set idea is not completely wrong, it does suggest that deep and abiding community can be created out of a general set of interests and values. But surely anyone who has experienced real friendship knows this is nonsense. If you do not define the boundaries of your group intentionally, they will simply present themselves to you, as they have with my friends and me. What's more, those boundaries are a good thing; they create the space in which our group exists.

Theologically we're a mostly homogeneous group of broadly evangelical Presbyterians, with a few in our midst who are more Anglican but who remain in the PCA because of the relationships we have in our local PCA churches. (I'll go ahead and out myself as one of the closeted Anglicans.) When we first met, many of us were uncertain about various theological matters. Several were Baptist, three were dispensational. Others of us had more basic theological questions. Emerging out of an anti-intellectual fundamentalist background, one day I would be questioning the necessity of the virgin birth and the next wondering if I could safely deny belief in the rapture. In this sense, we were initially an ideal example of a center-set group. We shared a common belief in the importance of Jesus and the uniqueness of Christianity. Beyond that, we had very little in common. But the important point is that we didn't stay in that place of uncertainty forever. As a group, we couldn't hold more definitive boundaries in abeyance forever.

Something very similar has happened in the history of evangelicalism. Early in the 20th century, the fundamentalists set up clear boundaries. Over time, those seemingly reasonable boundaries defining the community turned into a 50-foot-thick concrete wall with barbed wire running along the top, separating the good Christian people from all those evil sinners outside. In evangelicalism's first move toward a center-set identity, centrists like Billy Graham and Carl Henry tried to establish a middle road between the fundamentalists and the modernists. It was a move that lasted for awhile, but eventually boundaries crept in.

And if you want to know what those are, just ask your typical non-evangelical on the street to define evangelicalism. In most cases, you'll hear about opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, conflation with the Republican Party, etc. It's an unfair attack because evangelicals have been at the vanguard of the movement against sex trafficking, tend to be among the chief supporters of homeless shelters, and are taking an increased interest in foster care and adoption. But such is the reputation we have, by and large. (This is especially true in the culture-making centers that James Davison Hunter discusses in To Change the World: major coastal cities, universities, arts communities, and the like.) It sounds nice to say that we're a center-set group that allows a great deal of diversity, and there's a grain of truth to that, especially in regard to question of systematic theology. But in questions of culture, community, and overall values, we are just as much a bounded set as anyone else. It's just that we don't always realize it. And what's particularly bad about our functional boundaries is that they have very little to do with the Gospel. Moreover, even when they do relate to the Gospel, the connections are seldom made explicit.