Top 250 Rachel Held Evans Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.”

— Rachel Held Evans

2. “But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation.”

— Rachel Held Evans

3. “We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground. God got up.”

— Rachel Held Evans

4. “What makes the Gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.”

— Rachel Held Evans

5. “Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.”

— Rachel Held Evans

6. “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Image if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.”

— Rachel Held Evans

7. “Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.”

— Rachel Held Evans

8. “No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.”

— Rachel Held Evans

9. “What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.”

— Rachel Held Evans

10. “We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master.”

— Rachel Held Evans

11. “God’s ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.”

— Rachel Held Evans

12. “Faith isn’t about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time.”

— Rachel Held Evans

13. “I’ve often said that those who say having a childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children.”

— Rachel Held Evans

14. “Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus.”

— Rachel Held Evans

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

— Rachel Held Evans

16. “The truth is, a man can choose to objectify a woman whether she’s wearing a bikini or a burqa. We don’t stop lust by covering up the female form; we stop lust by teaching men to treat women as human beings worthy of respect.”

— Rachel Held Evans

17. “Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure id made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.”

— Rachel Held Evans

18. “Whenever we show others the goodness of God, whenever we follow our Teacher by imitating His posture of humble and ready service, our actions are sacred and ministerial. To be called into the priesthood, as all of us are, is to be called to a life of presence, of kindness.”

— Rachel Held Evans

19. “But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.”

— Rachel Held Evans

20. “We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.”

— Rachel Held Evans

21. “God and the Gay Christian is a game changer. Prepare to be challenged and enlightened, provoked and inspired.”

— Rachel Held Evans

22. “Church attendance may be dipping, but God can survive the Internet age. After all, He knows a thing or two about resurrection.”

— Rachel Held Evans

23. “Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”

— Rachel Held Evans

24. “I’m ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.”

— Rachel Held Evans

25. “The thing about healing, as opposed to curing, is that it is relational. It takes time. It is inefficient, like a meandering river. Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner. Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.”

— Rachel Held Evans

26. “The Holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second is grace.”

— Rachel Held Evans

27. “The good news is you are a beloved child of God; the bad news is you don’t get to choose your siblings.”

— Rachel Held Evans

28. “My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.”

— Rachel Held Evans

29. “Even here, in the dark, God is busy making all things new.”

— Rachel Held Evans

30. “We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, and we can tell when somebody is just trying to sell us something. I think church is the last place I want to go to be sold another product.”

— Rachel Held Evans

31. “Doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves.”

— Rachel Held Evans

32. “What sparked my imagination as a little girl stirs my faith today, reminding me that a misogynistic king running a dangerously dysfunctional superpower is nothing new and nothing God can’t handle. Maybe a little biblically inspired dark comedy is just what we need “for such a time as this.”

— Rachel Held Evans

33. “Prayer is a sacred space in which God invites us just to be – to be imperfect, to be messy, to be a ball of conflicting emotions, to be all of who we are this side of heaven.”

— Rachel Held Evans

34. “I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.”

— Rachel Held Evans

35. “The woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor.”

— Rachel Held Evans

36. “I’ve been convinced that LGBT Christians have a special role to play in teaching the church how to be Christian.”

— Rachel Held Evans

37. “One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us.”

— Rachel Held Evans

38. “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget – that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”

— Rachel Held Evans

39. “I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.”

— Rachel Held Evans

40. “Something about communion triggers our memory and helps us see things as they really are. Something about communion opens our eyes to Jesus at the table.”

— Rachel Held Evans

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

— Rachel Held Evans

42. “The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.”

— Rachel Held Evans

43. “The Psalms are, in a sense, God’s way of holding space for us. They invite us to rejoice, wrestle, cry, complain, offer thanks, and shout obscenities before our Maker without self-consciousness and without fear.”

— Rachel Held Evans

44. “Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.”

— Rachel Held Evans

45. “Grace has been out of hand for more than two thousand years now. We best get used to it.”

— Rachel Held Evans

46. “The church is God saying: ‘I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”

— Rachel Held Evans

47. “I don’t know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.”

— Rachel Held Evans

48. “God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing.”

— Rachel Held Evans

49. “He father told her, “What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.”65 Mine.”

— Rachel Held Evans

50. “If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.”

— Rachel Held Evans