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

by Rachel Held Evans

someone who doesn’t have to break herself open and bleed all over the place every time someone asks, innocently enough, “So where have you been going to church these days?”

As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “in an age of information overload . . . the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.”

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

Sometimes the church must be a refuge even to its own refugees.

We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.

As with the death of someone dearly loved, I felt the absence of my faith most profoundly in those everyday moments when it used to be present—in church, in prayer, in the expansive blue of an autumn sky. I became a stranger to the busy, avuncular God who arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and election outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease. Instead I lay awake in my dorm room at night, begging an amorphous ghost of a deity to save me from my doubt and help me in my unbelief. Reading the Bible only made things worse, raising more questions, more problems to be solved. The words of the worship songs in chapel tasted like ash in my mouth. I felt my faith slipping away.

I have no serious injuries to report, no deep scars to reveal. I left a church of kind, generous people because I couldn’t pretend to believe things I didn’t believe anymore,

Who will bring us casseroles when we have a baby?

I’ve known many Christians who say they had to leave the church to discover Sabbath.

Folks get concerned when you leave their church; they get downright judgy when you don’t bother to pick out a new one.

“We left for so many reasons, but the night we made the decision for good was the night my husband looked at our tiny newborn daughter sleeping in my arms and said, ‘I don’t want her to ever know that God, the God we grew up with, the one the church at large preaches. I don’t want her to grow up with the crap we did. I want her to know God, but not that God. Never ever that God.’ ”—C. J.

Our reasons for staying, leaving, and returning to church are as complex and layered as we are. They don’t fit in the boxes we check in the surveys or the hurried responses we deliver at dinner parties. How easy it is to judge when we don’t know all the details. How easy it is to offer advice when what is needed is empathy. How easy it is to forget that, in the words of novelist Zadie Smith, “every person is a world.”

Deconstructing was so much safer than trusting, so much easier than letting people in. I knew exactly what type of Christian I didn’t want to be, but I was too frightened, or too rebellious, or too wounded, to imagine what might be next.

I could only proclaim the great mystery of faith—that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again, and that somehow, some way, this is enough. This body and this blood is enough.

I wound up not in what church people like to call ‘a community of believers’—which tends to be code for ‘a like-minded club’—but in something huger and wilder than I had ever expected: the suffering, fractious, and unboundaried body of Christ.”

Before the words left my mouth, I knew I’d just violated rule number one of conversational self-preservation: never tell a religious person you’re searching.

What kind of God pulls storm clouds away from a church and pushes them toward a mobile home park?

“I spent a lot of years journeying through a bunch of religious traditions, looking for a place where I fit. But now I feel perfectly at home here with the Friends, or in a Catholic mass, or swaying and clapping at the AME church down the road. When the Spirit lives within you, any place can become a sanctuary. You just have to listen. You just have to pay attention.”59

Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.

A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can’t expect homogeneity. And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.

In other words, unity does not require uniformity.

And you will know they are thinking exactly what you used to think about Easter Sunday Christians: Nominal. Lukewarm. Indifferent. But 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

What makes a marriage holy isn’t the degree to which the two partners reflect gender stereotypes, or stick to a list of rules and roles, or even reflect cultural norms and expectations, but the degree to which the love of Christ is present in one of the most challenging and rewarding commitments two people will ever make to one another.