Searching For Sunday

I was, inexplicably, chosen for Rachel Held Evans's launch team for the release of her new book. I applied online and they sent me a copy of her new book, Searching for Sunday to review. 

I liked this book significantly better than Year of Biblical Womanhood. It is passionately written and honestly told. Evans uses some of the sacraments to discuss the richness of the church experience, the depth behind our traditions, and how they brought her to a deeper understanding of the role the church is meant to play. 

Some may say this book is about Evans leaving the church, leaving evangelical belief, choosing tradition over truth. I would question whether those people had read the same book I did. I found the book to be less about how to find the right church for you, and more about how to find Jesus wherever you are.

Evans looks back on her own experiences, her personality being one wholly devoted to right from a young age, and she sees herself from the perspective of experience, time, and hindsight. She paints a picture of herself, trying hard to do the right thing, looking down just a little on those who were not trying as hard as she was (a picture most of us can easily relate to). She tells of her experiences with learning grace and falling in love with Jesus -- an experience that resounds with most "millennials" who were teens listening to "Shine" and "The Great Adventure." We were young and passionate and had a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.

Evans applies the same lens, the lens of grace and understanding to her church experience. The church was an awkward teenager trying hard to do the right thing, watching the back row boys, extending to them grace it could not extend to itself. As the church grows it learns that the passion of its youth was not as shallow as its parents made it feel and that the legalism it had embraced as a teen was well-intentioned and protective, but ultimately harmful and kind of silly. As the church finds grace, finds Jesus, the table becomes more open and more reflective of the Christ it professes to follow. 

Evans has found her grace glasses, the lenses of which help her to see her church experiences, both positive and negative, through a new perspective -- the perspective of love. She looks beyond a bitter perspective, seeing the evangelical church as loved and loving, if a bit immature in their methods.