I’m not the least qualified person to write about Rachel Held Evans and what she meant to me. After all, I’ve read two of her books and followed her on Twitter for two long stretches.
But I can’t help but put words on a page about her work and her life and what it meant to me.
For those you who don’t know, Evans died last week of brain swelling. It was a shock to a lot of people. Only 37, and with two young children, her passing was heart-breaking not only because of her youth and motherhood responsibilities, but her love, care, concern and, of least importance, writing talent.
After hearing of her passing on Saturday, I re-read Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church over the last few days, finishing Tuesday afternoon. As a writer myself, I love her style of mixing emotional self-reflection with life story, biblical application with textual criticism. She was both humorous and intellectual, realistic and self-deprecating. I want to write like her, to turn phrases with emotional impact and spiritual depth while pointedly approaching problems she sees. She wrote with compassion, understanding the reality of life as a Christian and a human, not taking any crap while seeing people’s flaws and elevating them.
She spoke my language.
Most of us have a writer or musician with whom we relate. They’ve got a book or a song or a few songs that, when we hear them, we think, “That’s us.” I have a few music artists that have a smattering of songs that I love listening to because they feel like me — Ed Sheeran, two Australian artists recently recommended to me by a friend named Jacob Lee and Dean Lewis, and a few more. And when I was in high school, Relient K was me. Still are to some degree.
But I’ve only found two authors with whom I have that connection: Brennan Manning and Rachel Held Evans.
Not only did Evans challenge me as a writer, she challenged me to think critically about my faith. So many of us who grow up in the church environment have one of two outcomes: growing up and leaving the faith because we never made it our own, or growing up and keeping the exact same faith of our parents, never to be flexible because we didn’t learn how to be.
When I first read Searching for Sunday, I was in the midst of a bit of a sea-change in my walk with Jesus. I had more or less made my faith my own, but was struggling to find people with whom I could connect, who were thinking the same things I was thinking. I read Searching for Sunday and found a connection.
The book follows Evans’ church journey: growing up as a Bible drill nerd, asking deep theological questions at Easter lunch and going to college. In that journey, she discovers some things about the faith structure she grew up in that didn’t jive with the Jesus she knew and loved. Writing about the missionary Phillip’s conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch, Evans said:
“…we religious types are really good at building walls and retreating to temples. 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 getting in the way.” (39)
It got so bad that she just dumped church. She didn’t want to be part of the evangelical church structure because it stressed her out, made her made, made her sad. So she left.
I don’t blame her. There are a lot of things about the evangelical church industry that stress me out and make me mad and sad. There are things that, to me at least, don’t seem reflective of Jesus and who He is.
Rachel Held Evans wrote that and lived it. She spoke out about the church’s often-painful treatment of LGBTQ individuals, its regular allegiance to unnecessary and sometimes harmful politics and our consistent and general inability to just love people as they are. She found the places within the church community that were doing that and praised them, encouraged them.
The thing that’s amazed me the most in the last few days is how many Christian authors and speakers from varying points on the evangelical spectrum have written or Tweeted about Evans. RELEVANT Magazine compiled a good list here. Beth Moore, Jen Hatmaker, Peter Enns, Ed Stetzer and Russell Moore are among those who have posted brief or lengthy reflections on her life.
It’s a testimony to a person who might have had theological differences with some, but found common ground as much as possible. A person who stood for the least of these and the weakest because Jesus loved them most. A person who wasn’t afraid to speak truth about power because that’s what Jesus did. A person who just wanted Christians to be like Christ.
The other book of her’s that I read was Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again. It’s about the Bible, how she found a lot of things in the teaching she grew up with that didn’t match with the Bible she read. Like Searching for Sunday, it’s about reconsidering what you’ve grown up with, asking honest questions and finding answers that match what you see.
That’s the life I hope to live: open to being wrong, open to growing and open to what God has for me.
I write like I knew her intimately, but I never met her or talked to her in any format. But she wrote so honestly and plainly and openly. I want to be like that.
I want to speak that language.
By A Ransomed Soul 