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

by Rachel Held Evans

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.

Like a difficult marriage, my relationship with church buckled under the weight of years of silent assumptions. So I checked out—first in spirit, then in

We’d been taught all our lives that it was shared belief that kept us in this community of faith, so we just assumed difference in belief left us out of it.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist. —George Carlin

I measured every new experience by what I loved or hated about evangelicalism, which put all these good churches filled with good people in the rather awkward position of the rebound boyfriend.

All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain. —Ian Morgan Cron

“When [Jesus] wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about,” writes New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “he didn’t give a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.”46 I guess sometimes you just have to taste and see.