Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.

I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties,

Philip got out of God’s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing

Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”18

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.

living simply so that others may simply live.

All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain. —Ian Morgan Cron

Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure is made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.

If you want to be holy, be kind. —Frederick Buechner

Whenever we show others the goodness of God, whenever we follow our Teacher by imitating his posture of humble and ready service, our actions are sacred and ministerial. To be called into the priesthood, as all of us are, is to be called to a life of presence, of kindness.

“To be a priest,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.”38