Book Review

Sabbath Unrest

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
by Rachel Held Evans

Thomas Nelson, 2015
(288 pages, $16.99, paperback)

reviewed by Dennis R. Di Mauro

In the late 1970s, when Campbell's Soup entered the spaghetti sauce market, its sauce didn't sell well because of a public perception that a Campbell's brand sauce would be too "soupy." It wasn't until Campbell's introduced its Prego line of sauces in 1981 that its sales started to soar. It was still the same sauce, but its new name removed the "soupy"
perception.

In a similar way, Rachel Held Evans holds essentially the same views as her colleague and conference partner, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattoo-clad, foul-mouthed, recovering alcoholic and Lutheran pastor. They both hold to a high view of the sacraments and liturgical worship. They both vociferously defend gay marriage and "radical hospitality," the practice of offering Holy Communion to the unbaptized. They both seek to serve the outcasts of society: alcoholics, drug addicts, gays and lesbians, and so on. The only difference is that Evans is the "nice Southern Christian girl" version of Bolz-Weber. It's the same sauce, but Evans is the brand you can take home to mother.

Rachel Held Evans grew up in an Evangelical home in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father served as a Bible college professor. At age 14, her family moved to Dayton, Tennessee (home to the famed Scopes Monkey Trial), where he started a new position at Bryan College and her family joined the fellowship of Grace Bible Church. Upon completing high school, Evans matriculated at the college and graduated in 2003. She later worked at local papers in Chattanooga and Dayton, and in 2007 started a popular blog, http://rachelheldevans.com/blog. Her books include Evolving in Monkeytown (2010) and A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012), and she is also a popular speaker at mainline church conferences.

Autobiographical Essay

In her latest work, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, she uses the seven Roman Catholic sacraments to structure an autobiographical essay on what the Church must do to engage the younger generation, which, according to Evans, has largely dropped out of organized religion. In the book, Evans seeks to build her Evangelical credentials by telling humorous stories about the youth group games she played at church. She also discusses the salvation formulas she debated with Pentecostals at her local Christian school.

But despite her recollections of a past seemingly devoted to sharing the gospel and bringing the unsaved to faith, one can find little evidence that Evans still holds many of her old Evangelical views. In fact, instead of sharing the gospel, Evans often apologizes for it. For instance, she embraces the "Christianity is no better than any other religion, and is probably worse" mantra that is so typical of today's Protestant mainline churches. In one chapter, Evans cites the Crusades, the Inquisition, Luther's anti-Semitism, forced conversions, the mistreatment of Native Americans, and racism as evidence of Christian cruelty, and then adds to each the refrain, "Lord have Mercy, Christ have Mercy." Sadly, this litany of sins lacks depth and historical context, and is followed by a much shorter list of Christian heroes.

In her junior year in college, Evans began wrestling with her childhood beliefs, and upon returning to Grace Bible Church, these questions, and others, led to a crisis of faith. Over many Sundays, she tallied the times she disagreed with statements uttered from the pulpit. She writes,

 

"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." They will? "If the Bible is the inspired Word of God then we must accept this as historical fact." Must we? "God has called us to pave the parking lot."
Has he?

 

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But the biggest offense of all was her church's posting of signs in support of the Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment. The posting was interpreted by Evans as the equivalent of hanging a banner that said, "No Gay People Allowed."

Soon Evans and her husband decided to leave Grace Bible Church, embarking upon months of church shopping that ended in the creation of an entirely new congregation led by Evans's old youth pastor. However, this new church, named the Mission, lasted only slightly over a year, disbanding after a number of couples left the church and its pastor departed for another call in Florida. Having some experience in church planting myself, I now know that a year's time frame for a mission start is totally inadequate, and this failure may have been avoidable. But Evans rationalizes the demise of the Mission, mentioning two other congregations that also experienced this kind of "good death." This new way of understanding shuttered missions and church closings as brave and faithful "risks" seems to be the norm for pastors in our declining mainline denominations. Indeed, in the mixed-up world we call ministry today, failure is
faithfulness.

Evans also discusses her long gaps in church attendance, including a six-month hiatus after leaving Grace Bible Church and a two-year respite after the closing of the Mission. I found her perspective typical of today's church shoppers. Evans, like many contemporary Christians, acts as if it is the pastors' and other members' responsibility to provide her with a worship experience that is exactly to her liking. Her admission that she chose New Union Baptist Church for her wedding for "practical reasons"—it was "big enough to house all our guests and was close to the reception venue"—is also par for the course. Somewhere along the line, we have lost the idea that we are here to serve the Church, not the other way around.

A Few Embedded Gems

Regardless of the subject at hand, however, Evans's narrative returns again and again to the gay marriage issue. Much of this discussion is anecdotal, focusing on those young gays and lesbians who were rejected by their parents or loved ones because of their sexual orientation. The contrast Evans draws is simplistic: those Christians who reject the homosexual lifestyle are painted as insensitive and cruel (they often tell their gay children or friends that they will go to hell), while those who accept gay marriages are supportive, loving, and nurturing. Evans laments how thousands of World Vision sponsors stopped their contributions in response to the organization's decision to hire employees involved in same-sex relationships, alleging that these sponsors used "needy kids as bargaining chips in the culture war." But she never delves into why there might be Christians who honestly hold the historical position on marriage. The moral proscriptions against homosexuality found in the biblical text she ignores.

But in those chapters where Evans remains focused on one of the original aims of her work—gaining a deeper understanding of the Church through the unifying aspects of the sacraments—she succeeds with beautifully written explanations of these rites. These sections provide some wonderful descriptions of how God touches us through the sacraments and how they help unite all Christians ecumenically. Indeed, few authors have so insightfully described the mutuality of husband and wife in marriage (excluding the requirement of hierarchical gender roles) as has Evans in this work. There are some gems in Searching for Sunday, but unfortunately, finding them requires a long slog through Evans's recollections and agendas.