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

by Rachel Held Evans

Around me, people nodded their heads and raised their hands and murmured “amen,” while I raged internally at their confidence, their blithe acceptance of the very doctrines that kept me awake night after night.

I talked about Jesus—his life, teachings, death, resurrection, and presence in my life and in the world. I talked about how faith is always a risk and how the story of Jesus is a story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.

“long and rich Christian tradition which in Latin is called ‘totally faking it.’ ”21

We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent

doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid.

Rather than boasting a doctrinal statement, the Refuge extends an invitation: The Refuge is a mission center and Christian community dedicated to helping hurting and hungry people find faith, hope, and dignity alongside each other. We love to throw parties, tell stories, find hope, and practice the ways of Jesus as best we can. We’re all hurt or hungry in our own ways. We’re at different places on our journey but we share a guiding story, a sweeping epic drama called the Bible. We find faith as we follow Jesus and share a willingness to honestly wrestle with God and our questions and doubts. We find dignity as God’s image-bearers and strive to call out that dignity in one another. We all receive, we all give. We are old, young, poor, rich, conservative, liberal, single, married, gay, straight, evangelicals, progressives, overeducated, undereducated, certain, doubting, hurting, thriving. Yet Christ’s love binds our differences together in unity. At The Refuge, everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.24

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.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist. —George Carlin

Don’t normally think of Sunday as the first day of the week... I think of Monday. Interesting that the “first day” - a Sabbath day of rest - would be the firstfruit.

“When I get honest,” writes Brennan Manning, “I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.”31

Deconstructing was so much safer than trusting, so much easier than letting people in. I knew exactly what type of Christian I didn’t want to be, but I was too frightened, or too rebellious, or too wounded, to imagine what might be next. Like a garish conch shell, my cynicism protected me from disappointment, or so I believed, so I expected the worst and smirked when I found it. So many of our sins begin with fear—fear of disappointment, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of obscurity. Cynicism may seem a mild transgression, but it is a patient predator that suffocates hope, slowly, over many years, like the honey mushroom which forces itself between the bark and sapwood of a tree and over decades is strangled to death. When it comes to church, I am well acquainted with cynicism.

the easiest way to make oneself righteous is to make someone else a sinner.

I think it’s safe to say we’ve missed the point when we use his words to condemn and this story as a stone.

“This story as a stone...” <- A+ analogy.

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

“a kiss from God on our bruises.”

Use this for some poetry or a quote or something.

No one ever said the fruit of the Spirit is relevance or impact or even revival.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—the sort of stuff that, let’s face it, doesn’t always sell.

I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same. Such an approach may repel the masses looking for easy answers from flawless leaders, but I think it might make more disciples of Jesus, and I think it might make healthier, happier pastors. There is a difference, after all, between preaching success and preaching resurrection. Our path is the muddier one.

Downward trajectories

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.

The holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second, is grace.

“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 Such a purpose calls us far beyond our natural postures. It means surrendering all cynicism and pride to take up the basin and towel.

I really like this quote.

the nagging emptiness that accompanies a dream deferred.

“What in me is dark, illumine.”

all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles.

But in 1918 he discovered the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, whose famous “little way” inspired him to go about even his menial tasks with love.

Read this

Don’t be in such a hurry. Remember I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

The journey comes with baggage, yes. And heartbreak. But there are also many gifts. In a sense, we’re all cobblers. We’re all a bit like Brother Joseph, piecing together our faith, one shard of broken glass at a time.

No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.

This is beautiful, and an affront to my fears.

In other words, unity does not require uniformity.

“What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.”65 Mine is a stubborn and recalcitrant faith. It’s all elbows and motion and kicked-up dust, like cartoon characters locked in a cloudy brawl. I’m still early in my journey, but I suspect it will go on like this for a while, perhaps until my last breath. The Episcopal Church is no less plagued by troubles than any other, but for now, it has given me the room to wrestle and it has reminded me what I’m wrestling for. And so, with God’s help, I keep showing up.

A reminder that others, too, are wrestling without having given up.

The church offers death and resurrection.

healing is not an event, but rather a journey we walk as we make our way back to the memory of God.”

Cynicism is a powerful anesthetic we use to numb ourselves to pain, but which also, by its nature, numbs us to truth and joy. Grief is healthy. Even anger can be healthy. But numbing ourselves with cynicism in an effort to avoid feeling those things is not.

if we want to heal from our wounds, including those we receive from the church, we have to kick the cynicism habit first.

We have to allow ourselves to feel the pain and joy and heartache of being in relationship with other human beings. In the end, it’s the only way to really live, even if it means staying invested, even if it means taking a risk and losing it all.

Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.

G. K. Chesterton put it this way: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”81

It was a kind of death, certainly. But, as the pastor puts it, “it was good death.”

“New life starts in the dark,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”

The marginalized are always the first to comprehend death and resurrection.