Top 250 Rachel Held Evans Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Madeleine L’Engle said, “the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”58 I think the same is true for churches. Each one stays with us, even after we’ve left, adding layer after layer to the palimpsest of our faith.”

— Rachel Held Evans

102. “I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.”

— Rachel Held Evans

103. “Sometimes I think the biggest challenge in talking about the church is telling ourselves the truth about it – acknowledging the scars, staring down the ugly bits, marveling at its resiliency, and believing that this flawed and magnificent body is enough, for now, to carry us through the world and into the arms of Christ.”

— Rachel Held Evans

104. “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?”

— Rachel Held Evans

105. “This, I think, is the difference between charity and justice. Justice means moving beyond the dichotomy between those who need and those who supply and confronting the frightening and beautiful reality that we desperately need one another.”

— Rachel Held Evans

106. “As my friend Ed puts it: “When you join a church you’re just picking which hot mess is your favorite.”

— Rachel Held Evans

107. “We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees.”

— Rachel Held Evans

108. “So many of our sins begin with fear – fear of disappointment, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of obscurity. Cynicism may seem a mild transgression, but it is a patient predator that suffocates hope, slowly, over many years, like the honey mushroom which forces itself between the bark and sapwood of a tree and over decades is strangled to death.”

— Rachel Held Evans

109. “There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.”

— Rachel Held Evans

110. “To be a priest,′ writes Barbara Brown Taylor, ’is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.”

— Rachel Held Evans

111. “The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change. When you count each one of your beliefs as absolutely essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly as it is so as not to mess with your view of it. I.”

— Rachel Held Evans

112. “We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love.”

— Rachel Held Evans

113. “We may wish for answers, but God rarely gives us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, “Let me tell you a story.”

— Rachel Held Evans

114. “Jesus said his Father’s House has many rooms. In this metaphor I like to imagine the Presbyterians hanging out in the library, the Baptists running the kitchen, the Anglicans setting the table, the Anabaptists washing feet with the hose in the backyard, the Lutherans making liturgy for the laundry, the Methodists stocking the fire in the hearth, the Catholics keeping the family history, the Pentecostals throwing open all the windows and doors to let more people in.”

— Rachel Held Evans

115. “I’m afraid that just as wealth and privilege can be a stumbling block on the path to the gospel, theological expertise and piety can also get in the way of the kingdom. Like wealth, these are not inherently bad things. However, they are easily idolized. The longer our lists of rules and regulations, the more likely it is that God himself will break one.”

— Rachel Held Evans

116. “If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.”

— Rachel Held Evans

117. “When God gave us the Bible, God did not give us an internally consistent book of answers. God gave us an inspired library of diverse writings, rooted in a variety of contexts, that have stood the test of time, precisely because, together, they avoid simplistic solutions to complex problems. It’s almost as though God trusts us to approach them with wisdom, to use discernment as we read and interpret, and to remain open to other points of view.”

— Rachel Held Evans

118. “The Bible isn’t an answer book. It isn’t a self-help manual. It isn’t a flat, perspicuous list of rules and regulations that we can interpret objectively and apply unilaterally to our lives. The Bible is a sacred collection of letters and laws, poetry and proverbs, philosophy and prophecies, written and assembled over thousands of years in cultures and contexts very different from our own, that tells the complex, ever-unfolding story of God’s interaction with humanity.”

— Rachel Held Evans

119. “I began to suspect that perhaps the problem lies not in God’s goodness but in how we measure it. Laxmi and Kanakaraju and the women and children at the AIDS ministry, they prayed for basic things – food, shelter, health, peace – and they did not always receive. Yet I saw in their eyes the kind of joy and spiritual connectedness that most Christians I know long for.”

— Rachel Held Evans

120. “When the Spirit lives within you, any place can become a sanctuary. You just have to listen. You just have to pay attention.”

— Rachel Held Evans

121. “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.”

— Rachel Held Evans

122. “How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?”

— Rachel Held Evans

123. “It became increasingly clear that my fellow Christians didn’t want to listen to me, or grieve with me, or walk down this frightening road with me. They wanted to fix me. They wanted to wind me up like an old-fashioned toy and send me back to the fold with a painted smile on my face and tiny cymbals in my hands. Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own.”

— Rachel Held Evans

124. “Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian.”

— Rachel Held Evans

125. “Every good Christian knows that the best way to insulate yourself from criticism or input is to say that God wants whatever you want.”

— Rachel Held Evans

126. “It’s funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.”

— Rachel Held Evans

127. “At least for a moment, the religious leaders got it: Jesus hung out with sinners because there were only sinners to hang out with.”

— Rachel Held Evans

128. “I became a stranger to the busy, avuncular God who arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and election outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease.”

— Rachel Held Evans

129. “It’s strange that Christians so rarely talk about failure when we claim to follow a guy whose three-year ministry was cut short by his crucifixion.”

— Rachel Held Evans

130. “I wanted to believe, of course, but I wanted to believe with my intellectual integrity and intuition intact, with both my head and heart fully engaged. The more I was asked to choose, the more fragmented and frayed my faith became, the more it stretched the gossamer of belief that held my world view together.”

— Rachel Held Evans

131. “Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.”

— Rachel Held Evans

132. “If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that serious doubt – the kind that leads to despair – begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop. In our darkest hours of confusion and in our most glorious moments of clarity, we remain but curious and dependent little children, tugging frantically at God’s outstretched hands and pleading with every question and every prayer and every tantrum we can muster, “We want to have a conversation with you!”

— Rachel Held Evans

133. “If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that serious doubt – the kind that leads to despair – begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop.”

— Rachel Held Evans

134. “This is why it’s especially important for those of us who come to the Bible from positions of relative social, economic, and racial privilege to read its stories alongside people from marginalized communities, past and present, who are often more practiced at tracing that crimson thread of justice through its pages.”

— Rachel Held Evans

135. “In other words, the prophets are weirdos. More than anyone else in Scripture, they remind us that those odd ducks shouting from the margins of society may see things more clearly than the political and religious leaders with the inside track. We ignore them at our own peril.”

— Rachel Held Evans

136. “I’m frustrated and sad to think of all the good people who have abandoned Christianity because they felt they had to choose between their faith and their intellectual integrity or between their religion and their compassion. I’m heartbroken to think of all the new ideas they could have contributed had someone not told them that new ideas were unwelcome.”

— Rachel Held Evans

137. “When we refer to ‘the biblical approach to economics’ or the biblical response to politics’ or ‘biblical womanhood,’ we’re using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.”

— Rachel Held Evans

138. “At its best, the church functions much like a recovery group, a safe place where a bunch of struggling, imperfect people come together to speak difficult truths to one another. Sometimes the truth is we have sinned as individuals. Sometimes the truth is we have sinned corporately, as a people. Sometimes the truth is we’re hurting because of another person’s sin or as a result of forces beyond our control. Sometimes the truth is we’re just hurting, and we’re not even sure why.”

— Rachel Held Evans

139. “As far as I’m concerned, the teachings of Jesus are far too radical to be embodied in a political platform or represented by a single candidate. It’s not up to some politician to represent my Christian values to the world; it’s up to me. That’s why I’m always a little perplexed when someone finds out that I’m not a Republican and asks, “How can you call yourself a Christian?”

— Rachel Held Evans

140. “Cynicism is a powerful anesthetic we use to numb ourselves to pain, but which also, by its nature, numbs us to truth and joy.”

— Rachel Held Evans

141. “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

142. “But sometimes I think what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird. There’s no sense in sending her through the makeover montage of the chick flick when she’ll always be the strange, awkward girl who only gets invited to prom on a dare. 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. There’s nothing normal about that.”

— Rachel Held Evans

143. “If God is the God of all pots and pans, then He is also the God of all shovels and computers and paints and assembly lines and executive offices and classrooms. 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

144. “So why do our churches feel more like country clubs than AA?”

— Rachel Held Evans

145. “But “the first act of the Christian life,” says Schmemann, “is a renunciation, a challenge.” In baptism, the Christian stands naked and unashamed before all these demons – all these impulses and temptations, sins and failures, empty sales pitches and screwy labels – and says, “I am a beloved child of God and I renounce anything or anyone who says otherwise.”12.”

— Rachel Held Evans

146. “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.”

— Rachel Held Evans

147. “I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same.”

— Rachel Held Evans

148. “But as nearly every denomination in the United States faces declining membership and waning influence, Christians may need to get used to the idea of measuring significance by something other than money, fame, and power. No one ever said the fruit of the Spirit is relevance or impact or even revival. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – the sort of stuff that, let’s face it, doesn’t always sell.”

— Rachel Held Evans

149. “But sometimes I think what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird.”

— Rachel Held Evans

150. “To demand that the Bible meet our demands is to put ourselves and our own interests at the center of the story, which is one of the first traps we must learn to avoid if we are to engage the Bible with integrity or care.”

— Rachel Held Evans