Rachel Held Evans

Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.

What a comfort to know that God is a poet.

Caring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the home—these are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them.

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.

Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.

Faith is something you take a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start,Church isn’t about you! It’s about worshipping Jesus. Instead of being consumers, let’s go to church and ask what we can give Jesus because of all he has given us.

There is not a corner of this world that God has abandoned.

Wilhelm Dilthey puts it rather starkly, "Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, but what appeared was the church.

Seems to me that for you, evangelicalism is like the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago, but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.

In the years preceding the Civil War in America, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery.

It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.

The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further?,It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free.

Perhaps being a Christian isn’t about experiencing the kingdom of heaven someday but about experiencing the kingdom of heaven every day.

I don’t respect my husband because he is the man and I am the woman, and it’s my “place” to submit to him. I respect Dan because he is a good person, and because he has made me a better person too.

(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where “my dad’s hermeneutic can beat up your dad’s hermeneutic” served as legit schoolyard banter. ),The yoke is hard because the teachings of Jesus are radical: enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, extreme generosity. The yoke is easy because it is accessible to all — the studied and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the religious and the nonreligious. Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, applied differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently.

We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.

We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.

The word on the street was that I had two options when it came to caring for my future baby: I could either eat, sleep, drink, bathe, walk, and work with my baby permanently affixed to my body until the two of us meld into one, or I could leave my baby out naked on a cold millstone to cry, refusing to hold or feed her until the schedule allowed. Apparently, there was no in between.

While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation.

But what might a woman say about church as she? What might a woman say about the church as body and bride? Perhaps she would speak of the way a regular body moves through the world—always changing, never perfect—capable of nurturing life, not simply through the womb, but through hands, feet, eyes, voice, and brain. Every part is sacred. Every part has a function. Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away. Perhaps she would speak of the surprise of seeing herself—flaws and all—in the mirror on her wedding day. Or of the reality that with new life comes swollen breasts, dry heaves, dirty diapers, snotty noses, late-night arguments, and a whole army of new dangers and fears she never even considered before because life-giving isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s a thousand times more beautiful. Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her. Maybe she would tell of the time, in the mountains with bare feet on the ground, she stood tall and wise and felt every cell in her body smile in assent as she inhaled and exhaled and in one loud second realized, I’m alive! I’m enfleshed! only to forget it the next. Or maybe she would explain how none of the categories created for her sum her up or capture her essence.

To Jesus, "by faith alone" did not mean "by belief alone. " To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.

As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ. .