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

by Rachel Held Evans

They reminded me that Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.

Had I inherited more of my mother’s beauty and charm or shared some of my sister’s virtue, I might have gotten away with it, but instead I struggled through the trappings of Southern religious culture where a good Christian girl is expected to at least talk about the weather or football before getting to eternal damnation.

But lately I’ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection might be just what church needs right now, if maybe all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over, and if maybe that’s a good thing. Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.

So church is, essentially, a gathering of kingdom citizens, called out—from their individuality, from their sins, from their old ways of doing things, from the world’s way of doing things—into participation in this new kingdom and community with one another.

All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way.