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

by Rachel Held Evans

I was recently asked to explain to three thousand evangelical youth workers gathered together for a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, why millennials like me are leaving the church. I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. 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. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask. I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. T...

the prospect of searching for another faith community left me feeling so exhausted, cynical, and lonely I couldn’t imagine climbing out of bed on Sunday mornings ever again.

It’s strange that Christians so rarely talk about failure when we claim to follow a guy whose three-year ministry was cut short by his crucifixion.

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

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.

“Food is a language of care,” writes Shauna Niequist, “the thing we do when traditional language fails.”45

“a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.”51

This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.

The English word companion is derived from the Latin com (“with”) and panis (“bread”).53 A companion, therefore, is someone with whom you share your bread.

Peter had a vision in which God told him not to let rules—even biblical ones—keep him from loving his neighbor.

In my struggle to find church, I’ve often felt that if I could just find the right denomination or the right congregation, if I could just become the right person or believe the right things, then my search would be over at last. But right’s got nothing to do with it. Waiting around for right will leave you waiting around forever.

Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.

but I’m not convinced the pursuit of greater unity means rejecting denominationalism altogether. A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can’t expect homogeneity.

the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.

None of these friends report perfect or painless experiences, even in their new church homes.

“When you join a church you’re just picking which hot mess is your favorite.”

And sometimes, just showing up, burial spices in hand, is all it takes to witness a miracle.

We aren’t confirmed. We aren’t even that plugged in. Right now, we’re just showing up.

And for whatever reason, the people of St. Luke’s just keep loving us for showing up.

In the silence that followed, it was as if all the amorphous vagaries of my faith coalesced into a single, tangible call: Repent. Break bread. Seek justice. Love neighbor. Christianity seemed at once the simplest and most impossible thing in the world. It

And so, with God’s help, I keep showing up.

The windy Spirit just shows up and changes everything. “You’re supposed

We tend to speak disparagingly of the Pharisees, lumping them together in a single group we’ve made synonymous with hypocrisy, and yet a Pharisee risked his reputation to speak up for his friend, a Pharisee stuck with Jesus after most of the disciples had run away, a Pharisee personally cared for Jesus’ body when it had been all but abandoned by the world.

Even a Pharisee, it seems, can be visited by the Spirit. Even a Pharisee can see.

Sometimes I wonder how much I’ve missed because I haven’t bothered to look, because I wrote off that church or that person or that denomination because I assumed God to be absent when there is not a corner of this world that God has abandoned.

We know now what the Creator knew then: that the olfactory nerve is connected to the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, which is why the fragrance of a particular flower or the scent of a certain soap can suddenly flood a body with a memory, stunning in its visceral clarity. God wanted his people to know his scent. He wanted them to remember.

As Brené Brown puts it, “I went to church thinking it would be like an epidural, that it would take the pain away . . . But church isn’t like an epidural; it’s like a midwife . . . I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.’ ”73

And yet here they were, when they had every right in the world to run as far away from the church as their legs would carry them, worshipping together, praying together, healing together. Here they were, being the church that had rejected them.

ever since the Gay Christian Network conference, I’ve been convinced that LGBT Christians have a special role to play in teaching the church how to be Christian.

It all started when World Vision, a humanitarian organization I had long supported and even traveled with, announced a change to its hiring policy allowing people in same-sex marriages to work in its US offices. In response, conservative evangelicals rallied in protest, and within seventy-two hours, more

than ten thousand children had lost their financial support from cancelled World Vision sponsorships. Ten thousand children.

Then he asked me why, despite attending an Episcopal church

I may not worship in an evangelical church anymore or even embrace evangelical theology, but as long as I have an investment in the church universal, I have an investment in the community that first introduced me to Jesus. Like it or not, I’ve got skin in the game.

And then they make an American Heritage Bible and we’re back to breaking up again.

The annoying thing about being human is that to be fully engaged with the world, we must be vulnerable. And the annoying thing about being vulnerable is that sometimes it means we get hurt. And when your family includes the universal church, you’re going to get hurt. Probably more than once.

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.”

“There it was,” Stacey wrote in a guest post for my blog. “We knew it was coming. The spotlight had zeroed in on us once again. We had heard so many stories of our gay friends getting kicked out of their churches, or being asked to step down from ministry, or just being ignored by everyone until they left.”

As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who

It was also highly symbolic. In Jesus’ culture, the act of anointing signified selection for a special role or task. The heads of kings were anointed with oil as part of their coronation ceremony, often by a religious leader, and so this woman finds herself in the untraditional position of prophet and priest, anointing the Messiah. In the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, it makes perfect sense.

Marriage is not an inherently holy institution. And it cannot magically be made so by the government, by a priest, or even by the church. Rather, marriage is a relationship that is made holy, or sacramental, when it reflects the life-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus.

a lifetime of mutual love and submission in imitation of Christ is so astounding, so mysterious, it comes close to looking like Jesus’ stubborn love for the church.

the degree to which the love of Christ is present in one of the most challenging and rewarding commitments two people will ever make to one another.

when we leave men to draw all the theological conclusions about a metaphorically feminine church, we end up with rather predictable categories, don’t we?

“spiritual practice of wearing skin”: Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important to your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning.91

“When I do this,” she says, “I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing.”

Maybe it’s time to embrace her, flawed as she is.

this flawed and magnificent body is enough, for now, to carry us through the world and into the arms of Christ.

The kingdom isn’t some far-off place you go when you die; the kingdom is at hand—among us and beyond us, now and not-yet.