Katherine Willis Pershey’s “Open Letter to My Evangelical Friends”

I am still pondering article proposals and book ideas and the wealth of wisdom and advice I gained from a mere 30 minutes with Stanley Hauerwas last week. (Short summary: We are both passionate about the different stories people and our culture tell about life with genetic conditions and disabilities. We both spend lots of time in the difficult, tense space between the stories of disability as illness to be fixed and the stories of disability as identity to be embraced. He gave me lots of names of people to whom I need to send my book. And he’s not convinced I need to further my theological education, although I’m still thinking of doing so….more on that another time.)

So I’m not sure when I’ll be back with original blog material. But given how I’ve written here about the tension in my Christian journey and how I have, at different times and sometimes all at once, identified with both evangelical and mainline Christianity/Episcopalianism, I found a recent post by my friend (and #ItIsEnough cofounder) Katherine Willis Pershey to be especially poignant. Like Katherine, I spent time in an evangelical community but was uncomfortable both with my community’s stance on issues such as homosexuality and women in the church, and with the idea that those who are not “saved” or don’t “know the Lord” in a very specific way are going to hell. And like Katherine, I am nurtured by and grateful for relationships with evangelical friends who are my companions on the journey of faith.

Go check out Katherine’s “Open Letter to My Evangelical Friends.”