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

  Praise for Searching for Sunday

  As you read Searching for Sunday, you will feel that you are being breathed into, not just by Held Evans, but also I think, by the Holy Spirit, who felt very near, right at hand, as I was turning these pages.

  — Lauren F. Winner, author of Wearing God and Still: Notes on a Mid-faith Crisis

  Rachel Held Evans burst onto the scene a few years ago as a young writer with great promise. In Searching for Sunday, she fulfills that promise, writing with beauty, insight, maturity, humility, and plenty of humor. If you need a book to pastor you, befriend you, pick you up and dust you off, and maybe even give you a spiritual kiss on the cheek and a devotional kick in the pants, you’ve found it here.

  — Brian D. McLaren, author and speaker (brianmclaren.net)

  If you’re done with church or simply on the verge of throwing in the towel, then please, please, please read this book. It’s a brave, wry, and exquisitely penned meditation from someone who knows precisely how you feel. I loved every word.

  — Ian Morgan Cron, best-selling author, speaker, and Episcopal priest

  Rachel Held Evans has written a spiritual travel guide for religious runaways. She beautifully takes us with her as she leaves home, wanders, questions, suffers, and then returns. But the church she returns to is as true, raw, and beautifully difficult as the writer herself. As someone who has also left, been angered by, missed, then returned to church, I love this book. I love how Rachel doesn’t shy away from what’s ugly in her search for what’s beautiful both in herself and the church.

  — Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

  Oh my goodness, this is Rachel’s best book yet—and that’s saying something. In this beautifully honest, hopefully wry book, Rachel speaks for so many of us. I believe that her hard-fought words will heal many wounds. A must-read for all who love Jesus but struggle with loving or understanding or finding their place in the Church.

  — Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist and Out of Sorts

  Evans has written a zinger of a book. She is grounded in the deep things of faith. She writes in a vivid style and transposes the claims of faith into compelling concrete narrative. Her book is a forceful invitation to reconsider that faith has been misunderstood as a package of certitudes rather than a relationship of fidelity.

  — Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

  In Searching for Sunday, Rachel’s honest and hopeful wrestling tore through my cynicism about the perils of organized religion and touched my heart—reminding me why this heart achingly broken but beautiful Bride is worth the fight.

  — Michael Gungor, musician, composer, and author of The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators

  It is always refreshing to hear the painful truth about the conflicted life of faith from one more recovering American Christian. Yet it is even more poignantly healing to witness how our fitful human, sin-tainted truths can still lead us back to the one Truth that can hold it all. In these pages there is room for sacred doubting and holy tantrums because ultimately the love and grace of God permits us all that room.

  — Enuma Okoro, Nigerian-American speaker and award-winning author of Reluctant Pilgrim: A Moody Somewhat Self-Indulgent Introvert’s Search for Spiritual Community

  © 2015 by Rachel Held Evans

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Nelson Books and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370, www.booksandsuch.biz.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Scripture quotations marked ESV are from THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.

  Scripture quotations marked NLT are from Holy Bible, New Living Translation. © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7180-2213-6 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014956181

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7180-2212-9

  15 16 17 18 19 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Amanda—the little sister I look up to, and the person who makes me most hopeful about the future of the church.

  And to the community on the blog—I wrote every word of this book for you.

  Contents

  Foreword by Glennon Doyle Melton

  Prologue: Dawn

  I. Baptism

  1. Water

  2. Believer’s Baptism

  3. Naked on Easter

  4. Chubby Bunny

  5. Enough

  6. Rivers

  II. Confession

  7. Ash

  8. Vote Yes On One

  9. Dirty Laundry

  10. What We Have Done

  11. Meet the Press

  12. Dust

  III. Holy Orders

  13. Hands

  14. The Mission

  15. Epic Fail

  16. Feet

  IV. Communion

  17. Bread

  18. The Meal

  19. Methodist Dance Party

  20. Open Hands

  21. Open Table

  22. Wine

  V. Confirmation

  23. Breath

  24. Wayside Shrines

  25. Trembling Giant

  26. Easter Doubt

  27. With God’s Help

  28. Wind

  VI. Anointing of the Sick

  29. Oil

  30. Healing

  31. Evangelical Acedia

  32. This Whole Business With the Hearse

  33. Perfume

  VII. Marriage

  34. Crowns

  35. Mystery

  36. Body

  37. Kingdom

  Epilogue: Dark

  Sample of A Year of Biblical Womanhood

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security . . . More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us, “Give them something to eat.”

  —Pope Francis1

  Foreword

  WHENEVER I WANT TO SCARE MYSELF, I CONSIDER WHAT would happen to the w
orld if Rachel Held Evans stopped writing.

  As I tore through the pages in this book, I realized I’d been waiting my whole life for Searching for Sunday. The Jesus that Rachel loves fiercely is the same Jesus I fell in love with long ago, before I let my the hypocrisy of the church and my own heart muddle everything up. Searching for Sunday helped me forgive the church and myself and fall in love with God all over again. It was as if, over time, road blocks had been set up between me and God and as I read this book I could feel Rachel’s words removing them one at a time until by the end of the book I was looking directly at God again.

  Rachel’s Christianity is a daily discipline of boundless grace–for herself, for the church, for those the church leaves out. The faith she describes in Searching for Sunday is less of a club to belong to and more of a current to enter into—a current that continuously carries her toward the people and places she’s been taught to fear. Rachel finds herself not only loving these people, but learning that she is these people. In Searching for Sunday, Rachel convinces us that there is no them and us; there is only us. This idea of hers is both comforting and slightly terrifying. I have a hunch that comforting and terrifying is exactly what faith should be.

  Searching for Sunday is, quite simply, my favorite book by my favorite writer. From now on when people ask me about my faith, I will just hand them this book. Sweet Jesus, I’m grateful for Rachel Held Evans.

  — Glennon Doyle Melton

  Author of the New York Times bestseller Carry On, Warrior and founder of Momastery.com and Together Rising

  PROLOGUE

  Dawn

  I’ll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.

  —Emily Dickinson

  GERMAN THEOLOGIAN DIETRICH BONHOEFFER WROTE that “the early mornings belong to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.”2

  This comes as unfortunate news for someone like me who can barely remember who she is at the “break of light,” much less ponder the theological implications of the resurrection. I’m not exactly what you call a morning person and would, in fact, prefer to be the one lying prostrate in defeat at such an early hour. The halcyon joy of watching the sunrise remains for me just another of the universe’s inaccessible gifts, like the northern lights and naturally curly hair. No doubt I would have shooed poor Mary Magdalene away with a soft, pillow-muffled grunt had she asked me to help her bring the burial spices to the tomb that fateful morning two thousand years ago. I’d have slept right through the Main Event.

  Religious folks have always had it out for us night owls. My book of hours stipulates that morning prayers be said between 4:30 and 7:30 a.m. How I’m supposed to talk to God at an hour in which I cannot even speak coherently to my husband is beyond me. Yet nearly all the church’s most venerated saints were said to be early risers, and growing up, I remember pastors speaking reverently about their morning quiet times, as though God kept strict office hours. Even the world’s great cathedrals are built with their entrances on the west side and their altars on the favored east. Old European churchyards, dappled with wind-abraded headstones, still reflect the custom of burying the dead with their feet toward the rising sun as a sign of hope and with the expectation that when Jesus returns to Jerusalem at the Second Coming, the faithful will rise and look him in the eye. One can only hope this will happen sometime after nine o’clock in the morning, eastern standard time.

  If early mornings indeed belong to the church, then my generation is sleeping in.

  In the United States, 59 percent of young people ages eighteen to twenty-nine with a Christian background have dropped out of church. Among those of us who came of age around the year 2000, a solid quarter claim no religious affiliation at all, making us significantly more disconnected from faith than members of generation X were at a comparable point in their lives and twice as disconnected as baby boomers were as young adults. It is estimated that eight million young adults will leave the church before their thirtieth birthday.3

  At thirty-two, I only just qualify as a millennial. (Let’s just say I still have several episodes of Friends saved—on tape.) But despite having one foot in generation X, I tend to identify most strongly with the attitudes and ethos of the millennial generation, and because of this, I’m often asked to speak to church leaders about why young adults are leaving the church.

  One could write volumes around that question, and, indeed, many have. I can’t speak exhaustively about the social and historical currents that shape American religious life or about the forces that draw so many of my peers away from faith altogether. The issues that haunt American evangelicalism are different than those that haunt mainline Protestants, which are different than those that affect Catholic and Episcopal parishes, which are different than those influencing Christianity in the parts of the world where it is actually flourishing—namely, the global South and East.

  But I can tell my own story, which studies suggest is an increasingly common one.4 I can talk about growing up evangelical, about doubting everything I believed about God, about loving, leaving, and longing for church, about searching for it and finding it in unexpected places. And I can share the stories of my friends and readers, people young and old whose comments, letters, and e-mails read like postcards from their own spiritual journeys, dispatches from America’s post-Christian frontier. I can’t provide the solutions church leaders are looking for, but I can articulate the questions that many in my generation are asking. I can translate some of their angst, some of their hope.

  At least that’s what I tried to do when I was recently asked to explain to three thousand evangelical youth workers gathered together for a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, why millennials like me are leaving the church.

  I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

  I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. 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 suffering, in community, and among the least of these.

  No coffee shops or fog machines required.

  Of course, I said all this from the center of a giant stage equipped with lights, trampolines, and, indeed, a fog machine. I’m never entirely comfortable at these events—not because my words are unwelcome or untrue, but because I feel so out of my depth delivering them. I’m not a scholar or statistician. I’ve never led a youth group or pastored a congregation. The truth is, I don’t even bother getting out of bed many Sunday mornings, espec
ially on days when I’m not sure I believe in God or when there’s an interesting guest on Meet the Press. 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 I wish they’d find someone with a bit more emotional distance to give these lectures, 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?”

  Perhaps this is why I didn’t want to write this book . . . at least not at first. Oh, I tried to get out of it. I hemmed and hawed and pitched a bunch of alternative proposals to my publisher, hoping the editors might change their minds. It took twice as long to write as I’d planned. I even spilled a fat mug of chai all over my laptop right in the middle of writing the first draft, and, thinking I’d lost half the manuscript, decided that God didn’t want me to write a book about church either. (We were able to recover most of the manuscript, but my caps lock still gets stuck from time to time.)

  I didn’t want to put my church story in print because, the truth is, I still don’t know the ending. I am in the adolescence of my faith. There have been slammed doors and rolled eyes and defiant declarations of “I hate you!” hurled at every person or organization that represents the institutionalized church. I am angry and petulant, hopeful and naïve. I am trying to make my own way, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do that without exorcising the old one, without shouting it down, declaring my independence, and then running as fast as I can in the opposite direction. Church books are written by people with a plan and ten steps, not by Christians just hanging on by their fingernails.

  And yet I am writing. I am writing because I suspect the awkward teenager in the yearbook picture still has something to say about the world, some sort of hope to offer it, if nothing more than a few hundred pages of “me too.” I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties, and because in spite of all my doubt and insecurity, in spite of my abiding impulse to sleep in on Sunday mornings, I have seen the first few ribbons of dawn’s light seep through my bedroom window, and there is a dim, hopeful glow kissing the horizon. Even when I don’t believe in church, I believe in resurrection. I believe in the hope of Sunday morning.