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

by Rachel Held Evans

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

The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.

But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.

but I wanted to believe with my intellectual integrity and intuition intact,

just as I sat in church with my doubt, there were those sitting in church with their sexuality, their race, their gender, their depression, their addiction, their questions, their fears, their past, their infertility, their eating disorder, their diagnosis, their missed rent, their mess of a marriage, their sins, their shame—all the things that follow us to church on Sunday morning but we dare not name.

We’d been taught all our lives that it was shared belief that kept us in this community of faith, so we just assumed difference in belief left us out of it.

We think church is for the healthy, even though Jesus told us time and again he came to minister to the sick. We think church is for good people, not resurrected people.

Perhaps it would be easier for us to love if it were our own sins we saw written in that dust and carried off by the wind.

Sometimes I think the biggest challenge in talking about the church is telling ourselves the truth about it