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

by Rachel Held Evans

  The World Vision incident sent me into as deep a religious depression as I’ve ever known, and I’m still struggling to climb out of it. I know a lot of people who walked away from evangelicalism for good when they saw what happened, and I know a few who walked away from the entire church, unable to reconcile the love they see in Jesus with the condemnation they hear from his followers. But what I’m learning this time around, as I process my frustration and disappointment and as I catch those first ribbons of dawn’s light on the horizon, is that I can’t begin to heal until I’ve acknowledged my pain, and I can’t acknowledge my pain until I’ve kicked my dependence on cynicism.

  Cynicism is a powerful anesthetic we use to numb ourselves to pain, but which also, by its nature, numbs us to truth and joy. Grief is healthy. Even anger can be healthy. But numbing ourselves with cynicism in an effort to avoid feeling those things is not.

  When I write off all evangelicals as hateful and ignorant, I am numbing myself with cynicism. When I jeer at their foibles, I am numbing myself with cynicism. When I roll my eyes and fold my arms and say, “Well, I know God can’t be present over there,” I am numbing myself with cynicism.

  And I am missing out. I am missing out on a God who surprises us by showing up where we don’t think God belongs. I am missing out on a God whose grace I need just as desperately, just as innately as the lady who dropped her child sponsorship in a protest against gay marriage. Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

  The annoying thing about being human is that to be fully engaged with the world, we must be vulnerable. And the annoying thing about being vulnerable is that sometimes it means we get hurt. And when your family includes the universal church, you’re going to get hurt. Probably more than once.

  This doesn’t mean we stay in unhealthy churches or allow abusive people to continue to abuse. It doesn’t mean we participate in congregations that sap us of our life or make us fight to belong. It just means that if we want to heal from our wounds, including those we receive from the church, we have to kick the cynicism habit first. We have to allow ourselves to feel the pain and joy and heartache of being in relationship with other human beings. In the end, it’s the only way to really live, even if it means staying invested, even if it means taking a risk and losing it all.

  THIRTY-TWO

  This Whole Business With the Hearse

  The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  —Mark Twain

  IN 2013, A MEGACHURCH PASTOR FAMOUS FOR HIS CONTROVERSIAL antics arrived to a Sunday evening worship service at his church in Seattle in a long black hearse. Dressed in formal funeral attire, he posed for waiting photographers before going inside and preaching a sermon about how the church in America is dying and it’s up to Christians to revive it. A few weeks later, his book A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future? hit the shelves, complete with a hearse in sepia tones gracing the cover.

  It has become popular in recent years for Christians to speak of the impending death of the church. Conversations at denominational meetings and Christian conferences are as sotto voce as conversations around the dinner table about how this may be Aunt Marie’s last Christmas so we might as well let the racist comment slide. The alarm is not completely unfounded. Polls show the percentage of self-identified Christians in the United States has fallen from 86 percent to 76 percent since 1990, while the percentage of people claiming no religious affiliation has doubled, rising to 16 percent.79 Young adults seem especially disinterested in faith, with nearly three out of every five young Christians disconnecting from church life after age fifteen.80

  I confess to citing these numbers ominously myself from time to time, especially when I want to make a point about how millennials are losing faith in the church over issues related to politics, sexuality, science, and social justice. I may have uttered something along the lines of “adapt or die” in my writing once or twice. I may have jumped the gun and administered last rites.

  But lately I’ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection might be just what church needs right now, if maybe all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over, and if maybe that’s a good thing.

  Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.

  G. K. Chesterton put it this way: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”81

  I don’t know exactly what this new revolution will look like, but as the center of Christianity shifts from the global West to the global South and East, and as Christians in the United States are forced to gauge the success of the church by something other than money and power, I hope it looks like altars transforming into tables, gates transforming into open doors, and cure-alls transforming into healing oils. I hope it looks like a kingdom that belongs not to the rich, but to the poor, not to the triumphant but to the meek, not to the culture warriors but to the peacemakers. If Christianity must die, may it die to the old way of dominance and control and be resurrected to the Way of Jesus, the Way of the cross.

  I recently heard a story about a United Methodist church that was in decline. Once a thriving congregation in east Durham, North Carolina, membership had dwindled to about forty people who struggled to maintain the beautiful old church building on their own. A new pastor, fresh out of divinity school, tried her best to swoop in and fix things by resurrecting the finance committee, consolidating accounts, selling all the unused church vans, and raising payment on the rented parsonage, but the church only managed to limp along. It wasn’t until several other congregations from the neighborhood approached the church about meeting in their building that things began to change.

  A nondenominational African American church worshiped in the sanctuary on Sunday evenings and provided monthly offerings to cover utilities. A Baptist church asked for space to teach English as a Second Language to the Spanish-speaking residents of the neighborhood. And then, a Methodist church-start of immigrants from Zimbabwe asked to use their building for worship at eleven a.m.—the same time the original congregation usually met. For the next year, the original congregation worshipped in the second-floor sanctuary, while the church-start worshipped in a room below, and in their native language—Shona. The pastor said her sermons were often punctuated by the beating of African drums.

  The two churches shared meals together and held several joint worship services, including a Christmas Eve service with “Silent Night” sung in both English and Shona. But while the immigrant church-start continued to grow and grow, the original congregation continued to shrink and shrink, as its aging members died or moved away.

  “Clearly it made no sense for a thriving congregation to be squashed in their worship space while thirty people knocked around upstairs in a sanctuary built for five hundred,” the pastor explained. The dwindling congregation, she said, was “stuck somewhere between life and death.”

  So the church entered a period of praying and discernment, and time and again they returned to Mark 8:34–35: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (NRSV).

  Together, the church voted to give everything—building, furnishings, parsonage—to the Zimbabwean church-plant. The congregation itself stuck together and eventually dovetailed into another community that invited the few remaining members to worship in their space.

  It was a kind of death, certainly. But, as the pastor puts it, “it was good death.”82

  I heard another moving story, this one
from a woman I met at the Gay Christian Network. Like so many, Stacey grew up evangelical and loved every minute of church life until she realized she was gay. Suddenly, she said, “What was once my sanctuary became a dark and scary place.” Stacey was told she had to choose between God and her sexuality. After years of begging God to make her straight, Stacey finally accepted that the God who knit her together in her mother’s womb loved her unconditionally, sexuality and all.

  When Stacey and her wife, Tams, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2010, they searched for an evangelical church. Most of the pastors they queried explained that while the couple was welcome to participate in worship, they would be prohibited from serving in any of the church’s ministries, which was a priority to Stacey and Tams. Finally, they found the Cove, a small evangelical church with both conservative and progressive membership and a pastor committed to welcoming all. Even though they were the only gay couple in the church, Stacey and Tams fit right in and were embraced by the community. They joined a small group, got involved in Bible study, and before long were serving on the worship team and in the children’s ministry. Stacey said the church reminded her of what Jesus said in John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

  Eventually, Stacey and her wife became members of the ten-year-old church, a move that caught the attention of the denomination with which it was affiliated. A representative from the denomination came to investigate, as membership for LGBT people was prohibited by the larger church body.

  “There it was,” Stacey wrote in a guest post for my blog. “We knew it was coming. The spotlight had zeroed in on us once again. We had heard so many stories of our gay friends getting kicked out of their churches, or being asked to step down from ministry, or just being ignored by everyone until they left.” Stacey feared they would be next and she would have to relive all the pain and rejection from her previous church experience.

  But the Cove was different. The church refused to cast Stacey and her wife out. Their pastor met with denominational leaders several times to try and smooth things over, but in 2013 the church received a letter from the denomination announcing it would pull all of its funding from the Cove, effectively disbanding the small congregation.

  “On Sunday, May 26, 2013, Cove had its last gathering together,” wrote Stacey. “In a way, it felt like a funeral, but also a celebration. Our pastor had always challenged us to be a church to our communities outside of these walls, and now was our chance. We shared one last time, took up a collection for our pastor and his family, and then gathered in a huge circle to ask God to use this for His glory. My heart was so sad, and yet, so incredibly full.”

  “I always thought to myself, ‘This place is too good to be true,’ ” Stacey said, “and maybe it was. Or maybe it was the start of a movement, a movement to embrace love over legalism, regardless of the cost. After all, isn’t that what Christ came to teach us?”

  It was a death, but it was a good death.83

  As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is busy making something new. As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. We might as well trust him, since he knows a thing or two about the way out of the grave.

  “New life starts in the dark,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”84

  THIRTY-THREE

  Perfume

  Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

  —Helen Keller

  WHEN REFERRING TO THE EARLIEST FOLLOWERS OF Jesus, the Gospel writers often speak of two groups of disciples: the Twelve and the Women. The Twelve are the dozen Jewish men chosen by Jesus to be his closest companions and first apostles, symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Women refer to an unspecified number of female disciples who also followed Jesus, welcoming him into their homes, financing his ministry, learning from him as their rabbi, and teaching the Twelve through their acts of faithfulness. While the Women appear throughout the Gospels, they feature most prominently in the stories of Jesus’ Passion—his last meals, his arrest and trial, his death, and his resurrection—because when nearly everyone else abandoned Jesus in fear and disappointment, the women stuck around.

  Just days before his betrayal, Jesus and his disciples were eating at the home of Simon the leper in Bethany. While they reclined at the table, a woman John identifies as Mary of Bethany approached Jesus with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, worth about a year’s wages. Mary broke the jar of spikenard, pouring the perfume on Jesus’ body. The house filled with its pungent, woody fragrance as she anointed Jesus’ head and feet, even daring to wipe his skin with her hair.

  Everything about the incident was offensive—an interrupted meal, an excessive gift, a woman daring to touch a man with her hair. It was also highly symbolic. In Jesus’ culture, the act of anointing signified selection for a special role or task. The heads of kings were anointed with oil as part of their coronation ceremony, often by a religious leader, and so this woman finds herself in the untraditional position of prophet and priest, anointing the Messiah. In the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, it makes perfect sense.

  Anointing the head is one thing, but anointing the feet is another. Anointing the feet models the very service, discipleship, and love Jesus taught. In a culture in which a woman’s touch was often forbidden, Mary dares to cradle the feet of Jesus in her hands and spread the oil across his ankles and toes with the ends of her hair. Rather than measuring out a small amount of oil, Mary breaks the jar and lets it all pour out. She’s all-in, fully committed, sparing no expense. The oil she may have been reserving for her own burial, or the burial of a loved one, has been poured out generously, without thought of the future. The humility of her action foreshadows the foot washing that is to come, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet.

  But in the midst of all this symbolism and foreshadowing, Jesus sees something else at work. He interprets the woman’s act of worship as preparation for his burial. When the disciples rebuke the woman for what they see as a waste of money, Jesus responds by saying, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial” (Mark 14:6–8 NRSV).

  Jesus had been speaking of his impending death for a while, but the Twelve were having none of it. When Jesus told Peter that “the Messiah must be rejected, suffer, and die; then he will be raised,” Peter responded with such an impassioned protest that Jesus rebuked him with “get behind me, Satan!” In another instance, Jesus spoke ominously of his death and the disciples respond by debating who would be the greatest in the coming kingdom. And in another, James and John miss the point entirely by responding to Jesus’ prediction with requests to sit at his right and left hands.

  Clearly, the Twelve struggled to conceive of a kingdom that would begin not with the death of their enemies, but with the death of their friend at the hands of their enemies. I suspect this is why they complained about the “waste” of money exhibited by the anointing. They imagined that their ministry with Jesus would continue for months and years to come. You can sense the sadness in Jesus’ words when he reminds them, yet again, that he will not always be with them, that he is preparing for the most difficult days of his life.

  We cannot know for sure whether Mary saw her actions as a prelude to her teacher’s upcoming death and burial. I suspect she knew instinctively, the way wome
n know these things, that a man who dines at a sick man’s house, who allows a woman to touch him with her hair, who rebukes Pharisees and befriends prostitutes, would not survive for long in the world in which she lived. Surely a woman in this society would understand it better than a man. The marginalized are always the first to comprehend death and resurrection.

  Perhaps this is why the women stayed by Jesus’ side through his death and burial, after so many of the Twelve betrayed him, denied him, and fled from him in fear. This was the course of things, the women knew. They would see it through to the end because Jesus was their friend, and friends love one another even through pain, even through death. For their faithful friendship, the women are rewarded with being the first to witness the resurrection of Christ, the first to preach the gospel of the risen Lord.

  For her act of worship Jesus praises Mary in unparalleled terms. “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Mark 14:9 NRSV).

  What a remarkable thought—that at every communion, every Easter service, every cathedral and every tent revival, from Israel to Africa, to Europe to China, this woman’s story should be on our lips, right along with Christ’s.

  And yet, while we break the bread and drink the wine, we rarely pour out enough oil to fill a room with its fragrance. We rarely indulge all of our senses in an act of pure, impractical worship. Jesus wanted us to remember, but we have forgotten.

  Perhaps we should bring back this oil, this costly perfume, and make it part of our Eucharist. Perhaps, with the help of the Spirit, the scent of it might trigger our collective memory.

  PART VII

  Marriage

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Crowns

  They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.