Top 250 Rachel Held Evans Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “And what they find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try and fix it, to try and make it go away. Bible verses are quoted. Assurances are given. Plans with ten steps and measurable results are made. With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure.”

— Rachel Held Evans

202. “Faith is something you take a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start.”

— Rachel Held Evans

203. “Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one.”

— Rachel Held Evans

204. “When we understand the function of origin stories, both in our culture and in our lives, we can make better sense of those found in Scripture.”

— Rachel Held Evans

205. “But perhaps the most unsettling thing about a new church is the way the ghost of the old one haunts it. For better or worse, the faith of our youth informs our fears, our nostalgia, our reactions, and our suspicions.”

— Rachel Held Evans

206. “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.”

— Rachel Held Evans

207. “Jesus did not simply die to save us from our sins; Jesus lived to save us from our sins. His life and teachings show us the way to liberation. But you can’t fit all that on a bumper sticker. So we try to boil it down to a formula. Four steps. The “Romans Road.” John 3:16. And yet the gospel itself, in its eternal scope and scandalous particularity, defies reduction.”

— Rachel Held Evans

208. “The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel’s conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world.”

— Rachel Held Evans

209. “I know for a fact that a lot of my Christian friends have thoughtful reasons for interpreting the Bible the way they do and that the phrase “pick and choose” sounds far too arbitrary to describe the attentiveness and concern with which they approach the text.”

— Rachel Held Evans

210. “It bothered me that other people weren’t bothered.”

— Rachel Held Evans

211. “The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth.”

— Rachel Held Evans

212. “The more I learned, the less I felt I knew. The less I felt I knew, the more I listened.”

— Rachel Held Evans

213. “Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own... they weren’t rejecting me for being different, they were rejecting me for being familiar, for calling out all those quiet misgivings most Christians keep hidden in the dark corners of their hearts and would rather not name.”

— Rachel Held Evans

214. “Questions regarding which community borrowed from which are less important than simply acknowledging the fact that Israel shared a conceptual world with its neighbors and used similar literary genres and stories to address issues of identity and purpose.”

— Rachel Held Evans

215. “I knew somewhere deep in my bones that a revolution was afoot, that the women of this earth were rising up, and that, in some way great or small, I was going to be a part of it.”

— Rachel Held Evans

216. “So convinced God lived in the boxes I’d constructed, I failed to look for God in God’s favorite place: the margins.”

— Rachel Held Evans

217. “Historically, the Christian life began with the public acknowledgment of two uncomfortable realities – evil and death – and in baptism, the Christian makes the audacious claim that neither one gets the final word.”

— Rachel Held Evans

218. “All Sabbath is rest, but not all rest is Sabbath. Rest is not Sabbath if your comfort is contingent on others’ discomfort. Rest is not Sabbath if it exacerbates inequity rather than diminishing it.”

— Rachel Held Evans

219. “The truth is, we think church is for people living in the “after” picture. We think church is for taking spiritual Instagrams and putting on our best performances. We think church is for the healthy, even though Jesus told us time and again he came to minister to the sick. We think church is for good people, not resurrected people.”

— Rachel Held Evans

220. “I don’t know exactly how Jesus is present in the bread and wine, but I believe Jesus is present, so it seems counterintuitive to tell people they have to wait and meet him someplace else before they meet him at the table. If people are hungry, let them come and eat. If they are thirsty, let them come and drink. It’s not my table anyway. It’s not my denomination’s table or my church’s table. It’s Christ’s table.”

— Rachel Held Evans

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

— Rachel Held Evans

222. “That’s the alluring and mystical beauty of grace: people are drawn to it, even when they aren’t supposed to be and even when they don’t know why.”

— Rachel Held Evans

223. “I hadn’t yet learned that you tend to come out of the big moments – the wedding, the book deal, the trip, the death, the birth – as the exact same person who went in, and that perhaps the strangest surprise of life is it keeps on happening to the same ol’ you.”

— Rachel Held Evans

224. “Maybe the call of the wilderness is to ask us to think more deeply, more broadly, more adventurously, more boldly, about the maybes.”

— Rachel Held Evans

225. “The telos of a human-your telos, my telos, our telos-is to love lavishly and indiscriminately because we have been loved lavishly and indiscriminately. We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved.”

— Rachel Held Evans

226. “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

227. “Even on those days when I struggle to believe in God, I cannot deny the existence of my neighbor.”

— Rachel Held Evans

228. “Anyway, most of the openhearted wanderers I’ve encountered are looking not for a bulletproof belief system but for a community of friends, not for a spiritual encyclopedia that contains every answer but for a gathering of loved ones in which they can ask the hard questions.”

— Rachel Held Evans

229. “Maybe one of the lessons is that the wilderness is a place where we can’t rely on the familiar, which can seem like a hardship but might also be an invitation-an invitation into the reality of our existence, an invitation into the truth of our vulnerability.”

— Rachel Held Evans

230. “I am a Christian because of women who showed up. I am a Christian because of women who said yes.”

— Rachel Held Evans

231. “I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties, and because in spite of all my doubt and insecurity, in spite of my abiding impulse to sleep in on Sunday mornings, I have seen the first few ribbons of dawn’s light seep through my bedroom window, and there is a dim, hopeful glow kissing the horizon. Even when I don’t believe in church, I believe in resurrection. I believe in the hope of Sunday morning.”

— Rachel Held Evans

232. “Acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t make a person less faithful; it just makes her more honest. Admitting how much we don’t know doesn’t make a person less faithful; it just makes him more candid – and perhaps more curious. Anne Lamott has chronicled the meanderings of the heart as well as anyone, and as she famously puts it, ” The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”

— Rachel Held Evans

233. “Leadership isn’t a goal. Leadership is a role. Wisdom and strength are what we should pursue. Not leadership. Wisdom is discerning when to lead. Strength comes from practicing wisdom. Leadership is a role that changes hands depending on context. In that light, it is important to learn how to lead not because you want to be “a leader” but because when your wisdom and strength have placed you in a position of leadership, you don’t want to screw it up.”

— Rachel Held Evans

234. “Zerrissenheit is a German word that means inner strife, fragmentation, or, as the philosopher William James memorably translated it, “torn-to-pieces-hood.” Most of us know a thing or two about Zerrissenheit; even if we have no idea how to spell it or pronounce it, we’ve felt its shattering effect in our own bones. It refers to the sense of fragmentation and disjointedness we experience whenever we operate out of fear and shame.”

— Rachel Held Evans

235. “So my advice to women is this: If a man ever tries to use the Bible as a weapon against you to keep you from speaking the truth, just throw on a head covering and tell him you’re prophesying instead. To those who will not accept us as preachers, we will have to become prophets.”

— Rachel Held Evans

236. “Many of the first baptismal fonts were shaped as coffins, and baptisms took place just before sunrise on Easter morning to recall Christ’s triumph over the grave.”

— Rachel Held Evans

237. “There is liberation in not having to know everything and not having to impress everyone with that boundless knowledge.”

— Rachel Held Evans

238. “I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together... We’re going to need each other’s help.”

— Rachel Held Evans

239. “So after twelve months of “biblical womanhood,” I’d arrived at the rather unconventional conclusion that that there is no such thing. The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth.”

— Rachel Held Evans

240. “Love is what we were made to do. But even more than that, love is who we were made to be.”

— Rachel Held Evans

241. “Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new.”

— Rachel Held Evans

242. “May the church be resurrected to the way of humility. May the church be resurrected to the way of curiosity. May the church be resurrected to the way of mercy. May the church be resurrected to the way of service. May the church be resurrected to the way of wholeness. May the church be resurrected to the way of the cross. May the church be resurrected like Jesus. May the church be resurrected by love.”

— Rachel Held Evans

243. “Systems that teach people to disengage, whether emotionally or intellectually, do not produce healthy individuals. Nor do they foster thriving communities. Nor do they even honor the One who created the minds, souls, and bodies that we’re constantly trying to tame.”

— Rachel Held Evans

244. “Something tells me that we might all be a bit more careful, a bit more gentle, if we knew how our words can travel through another’s ear and linger for a long time in their soul.”

— Rachel Held Evans

245. “And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.”

— Rachel Held Evans

246. “God invites us to take the risk of love.”

— Rachel Held Evans

247. “To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.”

— Rachel Held Evans

248. “The reality is that we weren’t created to go, go, go, or to do, do, do. We were made to be.”

— Rachel Held Evans

249. “Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.”6.”

— Rachel Held Evans

250. “If I’ve learned anything from thirty-five years of doubt and belief, it’s that faith is not passive intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It’s a rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, all-night-long struggle, and sometimes you have to demand your blessing rather than wait around for it.”

— Rachel Held Evans