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

by Rachel Held Evans

“It’s not my job to change people,” Brian told me when I pestered him about it, “just love people.”

We’re good at making mountains out of our ideologies, obstructions out of our theologies, and hills out of our screwed-up notions of who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy and who’s unworthy. We’re good at

We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more.

Was I was supposed to believe the same suicide bomb that sent a terrorist to hell sent his victims to hell too? Because they weren’t evangelical Christians like me? Because they were born at the wrong place and the wrong time? And did this fate await the majority of my fellow human beings, including the millions who had never even

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.

Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”18

For William Wilberforce, who channeled his evangelical fervor into abolishing slavery in the British Empire, vowing “never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name,”29 we give thanks.

The last thing these people need is one more person calling them failures, one

When Jesus said he came not for the righteous, but for the sinners, he meant he came for everyone. But only those who know they are sick can be healed. Only those who listen to the rumblings in their belly can be filled. Only those who recognize the extent of their wounds and their wounding can be made well. In another story from the book of John,

No one ever said the fruit of the Spirit is relevance or impact or even revival. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—the sort of stuff that, let’s face it, doesn’t always sell.

But the gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. —Henri Nouwen CLAIRE LOVED HER BUSY, METROPOLITAN CHURCH.71 IT was where she connected with her best friends, where she met her husband, where she supported and served a homeless ministry, where she fit.

“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