Rachel Held Evans: Willing to Be a Messy Christian for the Sake of a Messy World

I believe that Christianity has been struggling mightily with accepting this new reality of a leveled informational playing field. We think if we cover our eyes and ears long enough, the internet will just go away. It’s not gonna happen, my friends. We don’t have the same top-down control that leaders in the past could claim. And you know what? I think that’s mostly a good thing. Although it can lead to some organizational chaos, at the same time it can also lead to a new reality that is more aligned with God’s kingdom. Let’s face it, every time the Church has become allied with power and dominance, it has failed to live out its mission in the world and has begun to worship idols instead. The new paradigm shift in the world today can open us to a more kingdom-aligned mentality where we reach out to our world with humble service instead of dominance and where we lower ourselves for the sake of our neighbor.

Evans writes of the difference between the cross and idols of power:

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. Stranger still is our fascination with so-called celebrity pastors whose personhood we flatten out and consume like the faces in the tabloid aisle. 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. … There is a difference, after all, between preaching success and preaching resurrection. Our path is the muddier one (112).

Later, she writes:

But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace (209).

I believe that one of the reasons the gate-keepers of evangelicalism resist Evans so mightily is because she really lives into this new reality and paradigm shift. She is willing to immerse herself in the messy real world that we occupy today. She is willing to let go of power-brokering and engage the real questions that people struggle with in our internet-centric, postmodern society. This means wrestling with hard theological questions. It means being ok with not having every answer to every question figured out. It means being willing to be vulnerable about seeing “through a glass darkly.” And it means doing all this publicly. That’s a tough thing to navigate. That Evans has managed to do so with a significant amount of self-criticism, grace, and willingness to keep growing and changing makes me admire her. In many ways, I’m trying to do the same thing she is trying to do. I’m also doing it publicly. As my worldview comes into intersection with other worldviews, new questions are raised. Sometimes they are messy questions, and the conclusions I reach are not going to make everyone happy. A willingness to be a person of faith in public while still being honest about questions and doubts can lead to criticism both from one’s own faith community and from those outside it. I’m convinced that such wrestling is deeply important during this time of history, however. I think for all Christians, whether public ones or not, maintaining an honest dynamic tension between certainty and questions is deeply important to our engagement with those who may not be believers.

I don’t always agree with Evans’s conclusions, and she probably wouldn’t always agree with mine. But we are sisters in Christ, able to gently and graciously remind each other of our shared core of tradition. This is what Christian community can do for one another. This is what it means to be one body.