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

by Rachel Held Evans

We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind,

The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity.

Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus—the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in ...

For me, talking about church in front of a bunch of Christians means approaching a microphone and attempting to explain the most important, complicated, beautiful, and heart-wrenching relationship of my life in thirty minutes or less without yelling or crying or saying any cuss words.

sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties,

the tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments invited me to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life again. They got God out of my head and into my hands. 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.

(Fun fact: more Christians were martyred by one another in the decades after the Reformation than were martyred by the Roman Empire.6

“In baptism,” writes Will Willimon, “the recipient of baptism is just that—recipient. You cannot very well do your own baptism. It is done to you, for you.”7 It’s an adoption, not an interview. The

Church came to me far more than I went to it, and I’m glad.

The good news is you are a beloved child of God; the bad news is you don’t get to choose your siblings.

But Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian.

historically, the Christian life began with the public acknowledgment of two uncomfortable realities—evil and death—and in baptism, the Christian makes the audacious claim that neither one gets the final word.

Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptized that “by this action, you died and you were born, and for you the saving water was at once a grave and the womb of a mother.”

Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.

My classmates seemed wholly unconcerned when I pointed out the fact that, based on what we’d been taught in Sunday school about salvation, the Jews killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz went straight to hell after their murders, and the piles of left-behind eyeglasses and suitcases displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent hundreds of thousands of souls suffering unending torture at the hand of the very God to whom they had cried out for rescue.

Evangelicalism gave me many gifts, but the ability to distinguish between foundational, orthodox beliefs and peripheral ones was not among them, so as I conducted this massive inventory of my faith, tearing every doctrine from the cupboard and turning each one over in my hand, the Nicene Creed was subjected to the same scrutiny as Young Earth creationism and Republican politics, for all had been presented to me as essential components to a biblical world view.

It became increasingly clear that my fellow Christians didn’t want to listen to me, or grieve with me, or walk down this frightening road with me. They wanted to fix me.

“I’m a Christian,” I said, “because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition—that we’re not okay.”

Our reasons for staying, leaving, and returning to church are as complex and layered as we are.

“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.

Church was alive and well long before we came up with the words relevant and missional, and church will go on long after the grass grows through our cathedral floors. 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.

“Grace cannot prevail,” writes Robert Farrar Capon, “until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.”

The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”

The “Not Catholic?” part of my brochure suggested I use this moment to “pray for the reunification of the church,” which, though I’m sure it was unintended, sounded a lot like, “You sit here and think about that schism you caused.”

Madeleine L’Engle said, “the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”58 I think the same is true for churches. Each one stays with us, even after we’ve left, adding layer after layer to the palimpsest of our faith.

unity does not require uniformity.

Our differences matter, but ultimately, the boundaries we build between one another are but accidental fences in the endless continuum of God’s grace.

IT WILL BOTHER YOU OFF AND ON, LIKE A ROCK IN YOUR shoe. Or startle you, like the first crash of thunder in a summer storm. Or lodge itself beneath your skin like a splinter. Or show up again—the uninvited guest whose heavy footsteps you’d recognize anywhere, appearing at your front door with a suitcase in hand at the worst possible time. Doubt will pull you farther out to sea like riptide.

you won’t know how to explain that there is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day

But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.

The thing about healing, as opposed to curing, is that it is relational. It takes time. It is inefficient, like a meandering river. Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner. Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.

the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.

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 . .

SEEMS TO ME THAT FOR YOU, EVANGELICALISM IS LIKE the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.”

I realize I can no more break up with my religious heritage than I can with my parents.

as long as I have an investment in the church universal, I have an investment in the community that first introduced me to Jesus.

I can’t begin to heal until I’ve acknowledged my pain, and I can’t acknowledge my pain until I’ve kicked my dependence on cynicism.

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.

Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against

but I think the point is this: what each of us longs for the most is to be both fully known and fully loved.87 Miraculously, God feels the same way about us.

we are to go about making disciples, confessing our sins, breaking bread, paying attention, and preaching the Word, we’re going to need one another. We’re going to need each other’s help.

We make something sacramental when we make it like the kingdom. Marriage is sacramental when it is characterized by mutual love and submission. A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility.

Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, Pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here.