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

by Rachel Held Evans

  Those first few questions about hell sent me sliding down the proverbial slippery slope and before long, I found myself questioning everything I’d been taught about salvation, religious pluralism, biblical interpretation, politics, science, gender, and Christian theology. Evangelicalism gave me many gifts, but the ability to distinguish between foundational, orthodox beliefs and peripheral ones was not among them, so as I conducted this massive inventory of my faith, tearing every doctrine from the cupboard and turning each one over in my hand, the Nicene Creed was subjected to the same scrutiny as Young Earth creationism and Republican politics, for all had been presented to me as essential components to a biblical world view.

  “You can believe the Bible or you can believe evolution,” a favorite professor told the student body in chapel one morning, “but you can’t believe both. You have to choose.”

  That recurring choice—between faith and science, Christianity and feminism, the Bible and historical criticism, doctrine and compassion—kept tripping me up like roots on a forest trail. I wanted to believe, of course, but I wanted to believe with my intellectual integrity and intuition intact, with both my head and heart fully engaged. The more I was asked to choose, the more fragmented and frayed my faith became, the more it stretched the gossamer of belief that held my world view together. And that’s when the real doubt crept in, like an invasive species, like kudzu trellising the brain: What if none of this is true? What if it’s all one big lie?

  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.

  “You have wrapped yourself with a cloud,” the author of Lamentations wrote of God, “so that no prayer can pass through” (Lamentations 3:44 ESV).

  While my parents had always welcomed questions and discussion, my friends and professors diagnosed the crisis of faith as a deliberate act of rebellion. After graduation, rumors of my purported apostasy circulated around town, and I found myself on the prayer request lists of churches I didn’t even attend. My best friend wrote me a letter comparing my doubts to a drug habit and explained that she needed to distance herself from me for a while. I still have about a dozen gifted copies of The Case for Christ stored in my attic.

  No one could believe that Rachel Held—once such a promising young evangelist—was losing faith. Their prescriptions rolled in:

  “God’s ways are higher than our ways. You need to stop asking questions and just trust him.”

  “There must be some sin in your life causing you to stumble. If you repent, your doubts will go away.”

  “You need to avoid reading anything besides the Bible. Those books of yours are leading you astray.”

  “You should come to my church.”

  “You should listen to Tim Keller.”

  “You need to check your pride, Rachel, and submit yourself to God.”

  (Oh, if I had a penny for every time I’ve been informed by an evangelical male that I have trouble with submission, I could plate the moon in copper!)

  It became increasingly clear that my fellow Christians didn’t want to listen to me, or grieve with me, or walk down this frightening road with me. They wanted to fix me. They wanted to wind me up like an old-fashioned toy and send me back to the fold with a painted smile on my face and tiny cymbals in my hands.

  Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own. As my mother tried to tell me a million times, they weren’t rejecting me for being different, they were rejecting me for being familiar, for calling out all those quiet misgivings most Christians keep hidden in the dark corners of their hearts and would rather not name. But like most twenty-year-olds, I didn’t listen to my mother and instead approached my doubt the same way I had approached my faith—evangelistically. Where I sensed a calm sea, I conjured a storm. Where I found people happily sailing along in their faith, I rocked the boat. Where peace flowed like a river, I came in like Poseidon. You get the idea.

  I was so lonely in my questions and so desperate for companionship, I tried to force the people I loved to doubt along with me. I tried to make them understand. This proved massively annoying to those friends who preferred to enjoy their dinner and a movie without a side of existential crisis—so basically, everyone. I was reckless at times, and self-absorbed, and I’m still mending some relationships as a result.

  Oh, how I missed Brian Ward. He and Carrie moved to Dallas, Texas, a few years after I graduated from high school to serve one of the largest youth groups in the country at a megachurch there. We kept in touch, and through our correspondence realized we were asking many of the same questions and raising much of the same hell, but in wildly different contexts. Brian sent me book recommendations by e-mail and I discovered N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Shane Claiborne, and Scot McKnight—unlikely sirens calling from another world in which Christians could doubt, Christians could accept evolution, Christians could have women pastors, Christians could oppose war. I read Blue Like Jazz and A New Kind of Christian. A faint light seeped through the cracks of my battered faith. I used the word postmodern a lot.

  “You should come back to Dayton and start an emerging church,” I prodded in an e-mail to Brian one day.

  “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind,” he wrote back.

  It wasn’t much, but on the Sunday mornings when I just couldn’t will myself out of bed and into the pews, I worked over those words like a rubbing stone in my pocket. Then I’d pull my covers over my head and mumble something about just not feeling up to it before falling back to sleep.

  Nothing brings you back to church quite like settling down. I met Dan my freshman year of college when we found ourselves sitting across from one another in Dr. Jim Coffield’s nine a.m. Psychology 101 class. (Truth: we “found ourselves” sitting across from one another because, over a period of two weeks, I inched my way a little closer to the handsome, six-foot-four New Jersey native, thinking he wouldn’t notice my subtle migration to his side of the classroom. He did.)

  Dan is the son of a former pastor, and his parents divorced when he was a teenager, which is about all you need to know to understand why Dan didn’t get freaked out over a little religious turmoil. He moved through the world with the patient maturity of someone who’d already had his expectations adjusted, who already knew that faith was something you took a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start. We dated for four long but happy years, and in the autumn after my graduation we married at New Union Baptist Church, a local establishment that had a sanctuary big enough to house Dan’s sprawling Jersey family and half the town of Dayton. Marrying Dan was the best decision I’ve ever made, and if it’s God’s only extra mercy to me in this life, then it will be enough.

  After we secured jobs in Dayton (Dan as a tech guy at Bryan College, I as a reporter for the local paper), we returned to Grace Bible Church, where my parents and a smattering of high school and college friends still attended. The congregation was warm, engaged, and well educated. A phalanx of finely dressed children chased each other down the aisles after Sunday morning worship. These were the people who threw us our wedding shower, embroidered our hand towels, and loaned us their power tools. Their initials are stamped to the bottom of casserole dishes I still haven’t returned, their handwriting scrawled across half of my recipe cards.

  We were, as they say, “plugged in�
� to a church. To be plugged in to a church is to be wired into a highly choreographed, interconnected system of relationships, programs, and events that together produce a society complex enough to put on a decent Christmas pageant. One’s function in the collective is determined by age, gender, and marital/procreative status. So as a young married woman with no children, my job was to host wedding and baby showers, co-lead a newlywed small group, make casseroles for potlucks, and inform people who had no business asking that Dan and I would start a family “in God’s perfect time.”

  I have witnessed firsthand how such a network can perform miracles: a month’s worth of dinners for the mom undergoing chemo, a driveway full of men ready to haul furniture the minute the moving van pulls in, twenty-four hours of prayer and rotating visits during a complicated surgery, fully stocked cupboards for widowers, and hours of free childcare for struggling parents. These are the quotidian signs and wonders of a living, breathing church, and they are powerful and important and real. But to a woman for whom the mere mention of a “ladies’ tea” elicits a nervous sweat, sometimes being plugged in felt a bit like being assimilated. There were rules in this society, particularly for women, and I still hadn’t learned my lesson about avoiding the topic of eternal damnation at baby showers, showers that were now, inexplicably, under my care. I was better suited for leading a Bible study or theological discussion, but those things happened at the men’s breakfasts (because, apparently, only men like theology and breakfast foods), so instead I constructed diaper cakes and mixed punch and listened to women exchange gruesome and detailed birth stories before turning to me to sing, “So, when can we expect a baby Evans?”

  On Sunday nights, Dan and I met with a group of five or six young couples in our home to discuss a church-approved Christian marriage book. Though the book’s teachings on traditional gender roles made me groan from time to time, it provided enough conversation starters for those of us who had been married for a grand total of three years to dispense our superior connubial wisdom upon those who had been married for a grand total of two. But the real fun happened after the discussion, when our closest friends stuck around to pop popcorn, play Texas Hold ’Em, debate politics, and discuss every imaginable topic until someone realized it was almost two a.m.

  It was in these late hours that we formed some of the most important friendships of our lives, the kind that go beyond small talk and beyond theological discussions to raw, unedited truth telling. We confessed our deepest fears and greatest doubts. We speculated endlessly about our futures and shared in one another’s joys and disappointments. We argued and apologized. We spewed hot chocolate across the kitchen in laughing fits and watched reruns of Arrested Development. This was our communion, our confession. This was the church that made our little three-bedroom-two-bathroom house grow spacious as a cathedral. In the company of these friends, questions and doubts were met with sympathy, not fear. No one felt the need to correct or understand or approve. We just listened, and it was sacred.

  Even after most of our group graduated to one of the many groups for young families, several continued to show up on Sunday nights, long after the length of their marriages and size of their families disqualified them from the newlywed category. Once we finished the marriage book, we didn’t bother to pick up a new one. We just baby-proofed the house so the kids could run around and invested in some nicer poker chips. I’m not sure we qualified as an official small group anymore, but on Sunday nights we had church.

  Sunday mornings, on the other hand, weren’t going so well. On Sunday mornings, my doubt came to church like a third member of the family, toddling along behind me with clenched fists and disheveled hair, throwing wild tantrums after every offhanded political joke or casual reference to hell. During the week I could pacify my doubt with books or work or reality TV, but on Sunday mornings, in the brand-new, contemporary-styled sanctuary of Grace Bible Church, doubt pulled up a chair and issued a running commentary.

  “America is a Christian nation,” said the man making the announcements.

  Is it?

  “Those who do not know Christ will be separated from God for eternity in hell,” said Pastor Doug.

  Will they?

  “If the Bible is the inspired Word of God then we must accept this as historic fact.”

  Must we?

  “God has called us to pave the parking lot.”

  Has he?

  All the beliefs I struggled with during the week were taken for granted on Sunday morning, accepted as self-evident fact. This made my own misalignment all the more pronounced. Around me, people nodded their heads and raised their hands and murmured “amen,” while I raged internally at their confidence, their blithe acceptance of the very doctrines that kept me awake night after night. I was surrounded by the people who knew and loved me best in the world, and yet it was the loneliest hour of my week. I felt like an interloper, a fake.

  We could never predict what moment in the service would trigger a full-blown crisis of faith. Once, it was the kids’ choir singing “Nothing but the Blood” during special music.

  “Surely I’m not the only one who thinks it’s creepy to hear all those little voices singing about getting washed in the flow of someone’s blood,” I muttered as Dan and I escaped out the double doors.

  Another time it was a prayer about God granting our troops victory over their enemies as they served him in Iraq.

  “Don’t you think the Iraqis are just as convinced God is on their side?” I whispered.

  Sometimes it was just the way people chatted in the fellowship hall about “those liberals,” as if feminists or Democrats or Methodists couldn’t possibly be in their midst.

  Often it was the assumption that women were unfit to speak from the pulpit or pass the collection plate on Sunday mornings, but were welcome to serve the men their key lime pie at the church picnic.

  Oh, Dan got to hear all about it on the drive home . . . and at lunch . . . and into the afternoon . . . and after we’d clicked off the lamps on our bed stands at night. Sundays were growing difficult for him too.

  One muggy summer morning, when we’d roused ourselves in enough time to pull into the church parking lot just a few minutes late, we noticed a half-dozen red, white, and blue lawn signs growing from the strip of grass between the highway and the freshly paved blacktop. They said “VOTE YES ON ONE” across the top and “Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman” across the bottom. In the middle was a stick-figure family holding hands.

  I groaned.

  It’s no secret that the Tennessee state legislature has kept itself busy over the last decade producing mountains of wholly unnecessary legislation designed to protect what it considers to be Tennessee’s most threatened demographic: white evangelical Christians. One proposed bill would have made practicing Islam a felony, punishable by fifteen years in prison. Another sought to ban middle school teachers from even mentioning gay relationships to their students. House Bill 368 (signed into law in 2012) encourages teachers in public schools to “present the scientific weaknesses” of evolution and climate change. In 2013, panicked rumors among legislators that renovations to the capitol building included the installation of a “Muslim foot bath” were assuaged when it was revealed that the fixture in question was, in fact, a mop sink.16

  That particular summer, Tennessee lawmakers were busy amending the state constitution to include a ban on same-sex marriage. Churches and conservative organizations across the state had organized a campaign to remind voters that if they wanted to say no to gay marriage they needed to vote yes on proposition one and the Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment. Nearly every church in town boasted several signs on their lawns, and now ours did too.

  “We might as well hang a banner over the door that says ‘No Gay People Allowed,’ ” I muttered.

  I didn’t have a lot of gay friends at the time. I hadn’t met Andrew or my friends Justin, Jeffry, Matthew, and Kimberly. I hadn’t yet reconnected with those high school classmates who, be
fore they came out, got as far away from Rhea County as they could. I wasn’t even sure what I thought about same-sex relationships at that point in my life, but I had no intention of voting yes on prop one because I didn’t see why my religious concerns should have any bearing on whether my fellow citizens enjoyed the same rights and privileges as I did under the law. When you grow up just a few miles from 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and when you move to a town situated on the old Trail of Tears where a man was once prosecuted and fined for teaching evolution, you get a little sensitive about constitutional amendments designed to restrict rights rather than protect them. Sure, the Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment sounded like a good idea to a lot of folks at the time, but how would it sound in twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years? I just wasn’t convinced we had this one right.

  Of greater concern to me was the way these signs were sprouting up like weeds in every church lawn in the county. If Christians in East Tennessee wanted to send the message that gay and lesbian people would be uncomfortable and unwelcome in our churches, that their identity would be reduced to their sexual orientation and their personhood to a political threat, then we’d sure done a bang-up job of communicating it. We’d surrounded our churches with a bunch of stick-figured families who, with linked arms and vacuous smiles, guarded our houses of worship like centurions. If you wanted to get through, you had to know your place in the chain. You had to assimilate.

  During the announcements, a man I didn’t recognize invited us to attend a meeting that night to discuss the “radical homosexual agenda in America and how Christians should respond to it.” He spat out the word homosexual the same way others spat out the words liberal, feminist, and evolutionist, and it occurred to me in that moment that maybe I wasn’t the only one who brought an uninvited guest to church on Sunday morning. In a congregation that large, there was a good chance the very people this man considered a threat to our way of life weren’t out there, but rather in here—perhaps visiting with family, perhaps squirming uncomfortably with the youth group in the back, perhaps singing with the worship band up front. How lonely they must feel, how paralyzed. Sitting there with my Bible in my hands, twisting its silk bookmark nervously between my fingers, I realized that just as I sat in church with my doubt, there were those sitting in church with their sexuality, their race, their gender, their depression, their addiction, their questions, their fears, their past, their infertility, their eating disorder, their diagnosis, their missed rent, their mess of a marriage, their sins, their shame—all the things that follow us to church on Sunday morning but we dare not name.