Top 250 Rachel Held Evans Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What a comfort to know that God is a poet.”

— Rachel Held Evans

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

— Rachel Held Evans

53. “Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity.”

— Rachel Held Evans

54. “When we require that all people must say the same words or subscribe to the same creeds in order to experience God, we underestimate the scope and power of God’s activity in the world.”

— Rachel Held Evans

55. “If love was Jesus’ definition of “biblical,” then perhaps it should be mine.”

— Rachel Held Evans

56. “I played my role as the good Christian girl and spared everyone the drama of an argument. But that decision to remain silent split me in two. It convinced me that I could never really be myself in church. That I had to check my heart and mind at the door.”

— Rachel Held Evans

57. “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.”

— Rachel Held Evans

58. “I remember the sense of invitation and joy I felt when I learned that the word “disciple” doesn’t mean “expert” or “preacher,” “lecturer” or “leader.” Instead, it derives from the Latin word discere- “to learn.” We’re learners. We’re all in process, all just partway through our studies, all nowhere near the completion of our educations.”

— Rachel Held Evans

59. “Wholeheartedness means that we can ask bold questions, knowing that God loves us not just in spite of them but also because of them – and because of the searching, seeking spirits that inspire us to want to know God more deeply.”

— Rachel Held Evans

60. “God became vulnerable. I can’t help but read the story this way. God was humbled, choosing to put down roots in a particular family at a particular time in a particular place.”

— Rachel Held Evans

61. “A family is a group of people who eat the same thing for dinner. – Nora Ephron.”

— Rachel Held Evans

62. “And sometimes, just showing up, burial spices in hand, is all it takes to witness a miracle.”

— Rachel Held Evans

63. “In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love.”

— Rachel Held Evans

64. “But what makes our marriage holy, what makes it “set apart” and sacramental, isn’t the marriage certificate filed away in the basement or the degree to which we follow a list of rules and roles, it’s the way God shows up in those everyday moments – loading the dishwasher, sharing a joke, hosting a meal, enduring an illness, working through a disagreement – and gives us the chance to notice, to pay attention to the divine. It’s the way the God of resurrection makes all things new.”

— Rachel Held Evans

65. “Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town. – Walter Brueggermann.”

— Rachel Held Evans

66. “We are not spared death, but the power of death has been defeated. The grip of sin has been loosed. We are invited to share the victory, to follow the path of God back to life.”

— Rachel Held Evans

67. “If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”

— Rachel Held Evans

68. “In baptism,” writes Will Willimon, “the recipient of baptism is just that – recipient. You cannot very well do your own baptism. It is done to you, for you.”7 It’s an adoption, not an interview.”

— Rachel Held Evans

69. “I am a Christian,” I concluded, “because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”

— Rachel Held Evans

70. “Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.”

— Rachel Held Evans

71. “We need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.”

— Rachel Held Evans

72. “We’ve got our way of dealing fairly with our enemies, and God has his. Our way involves retaliation and punishment; his way involves forgiveness. Our way involves equal justice; his way involves disproportionate grace. Our way is to make someone pay with blood; his way is to bleed. Even when Jesus hung on the cross, when God had been insulted to the highest degree imaginable, left naked, humiliated, beaten, and bruised, he said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

— Rachel Held Evans

73. “Even here, in the dark, God is busy making all things new. So show up. Open every door.”

— Rachel Held Evans

74. “Let nothing upset you, Let nothing startle you. All things pass; God does not change. Patience wins all it seeks. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone is enough.”

— Rachel Held Evans

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

— Rachel Held Evans

76. “There’s a great episode of The Office in which this strategy lands Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute in a lake during a sales trip, Michael shouting, “The machine knows!” as he follows the GPS instructions and drives his SUV off the road into the water. I’ve watched a lot of good people drive their lives, their families, their churches, their communities, even their countries into a lake, shouting, “The Bible knows!” all the way down.”

— Rachel Held Evans

77. “I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah. – F. F. BRUCE.”

— Rachel Held Evans

78. “Jesus invites us into a story that is bigger than ourselves, bigger than our culture, bigger even than our imaginations, and yet we get to tell that story with the scandalous particularity of our particular moment and place in time. We are storytelling creatures because we are fashioned in the image of a storytelling God. May we never neglect the gift of that. May we never lose our love for telling the tale.”

— Rachel Held Evans

79. “They reminded me that 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. They reminded me that, try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church.”

— Rachel Held Evans

80. “Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward – the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.”

— Rachel Held Evans

81. “It seems those most likely to miss God’s work in the world are those most convinced they know exactly what to look for, the ones who expect God to play by the rules.”

— Rachel Held Evans

82. “Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness.”

— Rachel Held Evans

83. “As a ring of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion. – PROVERBS 11:22.”

— Rachel Held Evans

84. “I’m a Christian because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition – that we’re not okay.”

— Rachel Held Evans

85. “Yet rather than confessing our sins, and rather than dismantling the systems that perpetuate them, many Christians shrug it off as part of an irrelevant past or spin out religious-sounding rhetoric about peace and reconciliation without engaging in the hard work of repentance and restitution.”

— Rachel Held Evans

86. “Church isn’t some community you join or some place you arrive. Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, Pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here.”

— Rachel Held Evans

87. “On the days when I am hungry – for community, for peace, for belief – I remember what it was like to feed people Jesus, and for people to feed Jesus to me. And those pieces of memory multiply, like the bread that fed the five thousand, spilling out of their baskets and filling every hollow space. Communion doesn’t answer every question, nor does it keep my stomach from rumbling from time to time, but I have found that it is enough.”

— Rachel Held Evans

88. “Peace and joy belong not to the woman who finds the right vocation, but to the woman who finds God in any vocation, who looks for the divine around every corner.”

— Rachel Held Evans

89. “We’re at different places on our journey but we share a guiding story, a sweeping epic drama called the Bible. We find faith as we follow Jesus and share a willingness to honestly wrestle with God and our questions and doubts. We find dignity as God’s image-bearers and strive to call out that dignity in one another.”

— Rachel Held Evans

90. “But the teaching that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling can be painful and isolating for women who remain unmarried or childless.”

— Rachel Held Evans

91. “When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not – static, perspicacious, certain, absolute – then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.”

— Rachel Held Evans

92. “Millennials aren’t look for a hipper Christianity... We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus – the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.”

— Rachel Held Evans

93. “Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.”

— Rachel Held Evans

94. “While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.”

— Rachel Held Evans

95. “Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator.”

— Rachel Held Evans

96. “Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.”

— Rachel Held Evans

97. “Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we’re not sure we want him to be. It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished.”

— Rachel Held Evans

98. “Mine is a stubborn and recalcitrant faith. It’s all elbows and motion and kicked-up dust, like cartoon characters locked in a cloudy brawl. I’m still early in my journey, but I suspect it will go on like this for a while, perhaps until my last breath.”

— Rachel Held Evans

99. “There seems to be a universal consensus among people of faith that God is a morning person.”

— Rachel Held Evans

100. “A lot of people think the hardest part about religious doubt is feeling isolated from God. It’s not. At least in my experience, the hardest part about doubt is feeling isolated from your community.”

— Rachel Held Evans