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

by Rachel Held Evans

“You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

pay attention.

Pay attention.

There are so many new things to see, so many gifts to give and receive, so many miracles to baffle and amaze, if only we pay attention, if only we let the Spirit surprise and God catch our breath.

When the Spirit lives within you, any place can become a sanctuary. You just have to listen. You just have to pay attention.”59

holds. Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God.

Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.

But when the wind’s at your back, you keep moving. You press on.

In other words, unity does not require uniformity.

He father told her, “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.”

Confirmation is promising to wrestle with my faith!

we pay attention.

“None of us can control what God does,” says Sara Miles. “But we can open our eyes and see what God is doing.”66

There is nothing magic about oil. It is merely a carrier—of memory, of healing, of grace. We anoint not to cure, but to heal. We anoint to soothe, to dignify, and even in our suffering, to remember the scent of God.

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 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.”81

“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.”84

Rather, marriage is a relationship that is made holy, or sacramental, when it reflects the life-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus.

Sometimes I think the biggest challenge in talking about the church is telling ourselves the truth about it—acknowledging the scars, staring down the ugly bits, marveling at its resiliency, and believing that this flawed and magnificent body is enough, for now, to carry us through the world and into the arms of Christ.

The Epistles are, after all, letters, and so they have a pastoral emphasis rather than an evangelistic one. The authors of the epistles are less concerned with announcing the reign

Jesus Went Back to Heaven and All He Left Me Was This Lousy Church

I’m not exactly sure how all this works, but I think, ultimately, it means I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together. We might not always do it within the walls of church or even in an organized religion, but if 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 meed each other!

The church is not the same as the kingdom.

All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.

Church isn’t some community you join or some place you arrive. 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. Even here, in the dark, God is busy making all things new. So show up. Open every door. At the risk of looking like a fool buried with his feet facing the East or like a mockingbird singing stubbornly at the night, anticipate resurrection. It’s either just around the bend or a million miles away. Or perhaps it’s somewhere in between. Let’s find out together.