A thing or two about the way out of the grave

The only way twitter is a functional thing for me is Tweetdeck and lists. I have my main feed of follows which is a mix of writers, comedians, bands, and friends, but I also have a politics list (mostly made up of socialists and leftists), a sports list (mostly made up of Dallas Mavericks writers), a Christian people list. On Tweetdeck you can also setup a feed of just individual accounts. I have NBA writer Zach Lowe in his own feed and a Baylor sports account that it’s own feed. Several of these I setup a long time ago and just never bothered to change them even though I rarely read them regularly. Instead I just scroll past them on the way to check out my mentions. One of those individual feeds was for the writer Rachel Held Evans, who died yesterday morning at the age of 37.

For those unfamiliar with her work (and I confess I have not read as much of it in depth as I should have), Evans wrote for people looking for reasons to stick with the church in spite of their hurts and in spite of their doubts. She wrote for evangelicals that had been rejected by the church and that aspired for their faith and their life together to be something better. Through her writing she gave many of them some reasons to do that. That’s really something.

One reason I followed her was because I hoped to write for that same audience. From what I gathered from her feed, Evans wrote more about how and why the church should be more inclusive of people whose bodies and identities have lead to them being excluded from the church. She really has a knack for combining an evangelical sensibility and sincerity with strong open, progressive conviction. I kept her feed up because I wanted to think about who I wanted to read my writing and it’s easy to forget that my own personally curated field of vision (on and offline) is just one segment of people. Evans seemed like openness to all people included those that aggressively disagreed with her and refused her the grace and respect she gave them and because of that in enjoyed watching how she interacted with her audience.

I’ll also confess that at times I found her frustrating. Sometimes she seemed a bit naive, taking conservative evangelicals at their word. I wanted her to just tell them to screw off. But I have to admit I also found her interactions with many of them impressive. It always seemed rooted in a hope that they could and should be better and that in some way it was her job to stand up to them if not for her sake than for the sake of other women and LGBTQ people. She offered thousands of people a glimpse of the ways the Christian faith could be less unkind and unfair than the conservative, white evangelicalism that Gen X and millennials were raised in. She seemed genuinely invested in the struggle for a better church when she had plenty of reason to walk away. She showed up and did the work because she knew people, especially people that churches had hurt over and over, needed her to.

And if at times I thought her views of the world and politics were a bit precious and rooted in a longing to go back to a time when things were normal, she never backed down and didn’t seem to suffer bullshit when there was plenty of it to suffer. Because I’d see her feed in my tweetdeck, I’d occasionally catch glimpses of conversations she’d have with conservative white males that dropped in to argue with her. I imagine this happened a lot.

Evans wasn’t the one that helped me bridge the gap out of conservatism. Rob Bell and Donald Miller were. I think it’s mostly due to the timing of when I was asking the questions I did but I’ll also admit it’s also probably because they were white guys and I am too. But in thinking about what they meant to me thirteen years ago when I first encountered them and what they mean now really puts into relief what Evans did. Miller is now a Brand Guru, an Instagram Success Story guy as someone on twitter put it. Rob Bell was last seen in a villa with Oprah devising new ways to make The Secret sound smart and innovative.

After her first book, Evans probably could’ve just ridden out the speaking circuit or become a Brand Coach or hung out with Oprah. She probably had options that didn’t result in her mentions turning into a dumpster fire started by conservative white men.I can’t imagine Miller or Bell writing public posts calling evangelicals away from Donald Trump. She didn’t bail on Christian writers or speakers and seemed like she was using the power she had to actually make avenues for them to be heard.

Perhaps one reason her death really struck something in me is timing. This last week I went to a small conference/retreat for young clergy in Indianapolis. It was my fourth time going to this particular conference. Last year I went to it on the heels of attending the Festival of Faith and Writing. A week later, my first piece was published at Sojourners. I co-authored it with my friend Chris and in it we make the case for why Christians should pay attention to the rise in socialism and why they in fact should consider becoming socialists.

That piece of writing marked the beginning of the end at the church I worked at and set off what a series of conflicts with people in the church that started with that piece of writing but didn’t end there. Some didn’t like that a minister in the church wrote publicly at all. Others didn’t like that I was a socialist. Others had problems with the timeliness of my emails. One person held a six month grudge for an off-handed joke that I didn’t even remember and that only came up when they were considering leaving the church. Not every disagreement and conflict was about my writing or my politics, but had I not written anything and had I kept my politics to myself, things might’ve gone differently.

A year ago also marked the beginning of a beginning. Between that piece and a book review in Commonweal, I began writing more regularly and when I finally left the church I had the two most important pieces I’ve written published that have opened up more opportunities. But beyond that I figured out how to write. I’m not great, but I write and revise. Write and revise. Struggle to get the words down then struggle to make them better. I think one reason I kept Evan’s feed in my Tweetdeck for so long because I hoped she’d come across my writing in a place like Sojourners or Commonweal and I hoped she’d pass it along. I hoped that we were writing for the same people and towards something similar.

I spent a lot of this week thinking of the last year in my work as a pastor and a writer, and have come to a much deeper appreciation for Evans approach. Being straight, white, and male, I’ve never been unwelcome in a church for the more visible, obvious ways that I am. She admirably endured so much backlash for her insistence that all people belong to the church and to God.

I tweeted out that I always appreciated that she “seemed to genuinely grieve what had become of evangelicalism and wanted to help people find a more humane, faithful way of being Christian.” I don’t think I’ve grieved the church I left. Not really and not in the way that Evans seemed to grieve the way conservative evangelicals betrayed her aspirations for them. I’ve re-read sermons, emails, things I wrote directly to the church. The aspiration was there, but I couldn’t learn to live with its loss the way she seemed able to, and if at times I’d read her tweets and think “You’ve really just got to move on from all this and start making the next thing,” she also reminded me that there are a lot of people that want and need to hold on in order to consider the possibility of the next thing.

I’m now about halfway through her book Searching for Sunday after purchasing it this afternoon, and I love the way she re-fashions what we already know of Christianity, the practices we already have but that can be reimagined and practiced differently. I know a number of friends for whom that book and that work kept them from jettisoning it all. I’m finding it relatable in thinking through the church I’m a part of re-planting. She clearly spent a lot of time on the sentences. Write and revise. Write and revise.

There’s a chapter in that book called “This Whole Business With the Hearse” which, as you can imagine, is quite haunting on this Saturday afternoon. It’s about church decline and the potential end of American Christianity as we know it. Two passages stand out to me that I hope and believe we’re in the midst of witnessing.

“I don’t know exactly what this new revolution will look like, but as the center of Christianity shifts from the global West to the global South and East, and as Christians in the United States are forced to gauge the success of the church by something other than money and power, I hope it looks like altars transforming into tables, gates transforming into open doors, and cure-alls transforming into healing oils. I hope it looks like a kingdom that belongs not to the rich, but to the poor, not to the triumphant but to the meek, not to the culture warriors but to the peacemakers. If Christianity must die, may it die to the old way of dominance and control and be resurrected to the Way of Jesus, the Way of the cross.”

She wrote that in 2015. Over the last few years I saw how she had an opposition to Trump and his supporters, but I think she also saw that his election and evangelical support for him meant the possibility of the end of something. For many it’s been a final, clean break from what has been even if what will be isn’t clear yet.

The second paragraph that stood out from that chapter of the book is this:

“As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is busy making something new. As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. We might as well trust him, since he knows a thing or two about the way out of the grave.”

The whole book reads like an admonition to keep showing up. Do the work. Break the bread. Preach the sermon. Heal the sick. Share what you have. Struggle against all the forces of evil that destroy life whether they’re political powers, institutions, your own fallenness, your own church. Write and revise. Write and revise. Do the work until you can’t. And then you’re done.

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