Searching for Sunday

Rachel Held Evans, a writer and speaker who identifies with the millennial generation, organizes this memoir around the seven sacraments, or sacred rites, recognized by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches: baptism, confession, holy orders (ordination into church ministry), communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage. Through these rites, she traces her journey of loving, leaving, and searching for the church. Evans explains that the tangible nature of the sacraments drew her back to church after she had given up on it, reminding her that Christianity is meant to be lived in community. The book is less about finding a Sunday church, she writes, and more about searching for Sunday resurrection: the strange ways God brings dead things back to life.

Evans opens by describing how she is frequently asked to explain why young adults are leaving the church. At a Nashville conference, she told three thousand evangelical youth workers that millennials are tired of culture wars, the false choice between science and faith, and an unwelcoming posture toward LGBT people. Yet she admits she is not a scholar or pastor and that many Sunday mornings she does not bother getting out of bed.

The section on baptism begins with Evans recounting her own baptism at nearly thirteen alongside her younger sister, Amanda, by their father, a Bible college professor, at a Southern evangelical church in Birmingham, Alabama. She recalls anxieties about the "age of accountability," the point at which children become responsible for their own salvation. Evans reflects that baptism is a naming: God's declaration of belovedness, not a reward for right belief. After her family moved to Dayton, Tennessee, home of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over the teaching of evolution, Evans enrolled in public school and devoted herself to evangelism. She introduces Brian Ward, a popular youth pastor at Grace Bible Church who invited her to lead lessons.

In the section on confession, Evans recounts how her faith unraveled at Bryan College, the Christian liberal arts school where her father taught theology. The September 11 attacks and the Iraq War raised troubling questions, and her doubts cascaded into questions about salvation, biblical interpretation, politics, and gender. Friends diagnosed her crisis as rebellion; her best friend compared her doubts to a drug habit and distanced herself.

Evans met her future husband, Dan, the son of a former pastor, in a college psychology class. They married and settled in Dayton, returning to Grace Bible Church, where Evans became involved but chafed at the exclusion of women from teaching roles. Sunday mornings grew unbearable as her doubts collided with confident assertions about hell, biblical inerrancy, and politics. The tipping point arrived when signs supporting a Tennessee constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage appeared on the church lawn. Evans remained silent, convinced she could never be herself in this community. When their pastor invited the couple to discuss their departure, they acknowledged they could no longer sign the church's doctrinal statement. Evans cried in the car, startled by the thought: "Who will bring us casseroles when we have a baby?" (65).

Evans compares the church at its best to a recovery group where people bond over shared brokenness. She profiles the Refuge in Denver, co-founded by Kathy Escobar, a former megachurch leader, which replaces a doctrinal statement with an invitation: "Everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable" (73). She also catalogs historic atrocities committed in Christianity's name, from the Crusades to defenses of slavery, balancing these with thanksgiving for figures like Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks.

For months, Evans and Dan spent Sunday mornings in pajamas. Eventually they began visiting churches across the county, approaching each with smug detachment that Evans recognizes as pride. At Amanda's wedding reception, Brian Ward announced he and his wife, Carrie, were moving back to Dayton to start a new church and invited Evans and Dan to join.

The section on holy orders chronicles that church, called the Mission. In April 2010, a small core group began meeting above a funeral home. Evans composed liturgy from The Book of Common Prayer, a collection of services used in Anglican and Episcopal churches. They moved into a donated storefront, but membership stagnated and finances ran dry. By Easter 2011, the Mission collapsed. Evans reflects that even this failed church produced fruit: baptism, communion, and service to the sick. Church, she writes, is not a building but "a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near" (113).

The section on communion traces the Eucharist, the sacrament of bread and wine commemorating Christ's body and blood, from the earliest Christian meals to the present. At a Methodist youth retreat in Virginia, Evans distributed bread to hundreds of teenagers and realized communion steals the show from the ego. She advocates for an open table, telling the story of Sara Miles, a secular, lesbian woman who wandered into an Episcopal church in San Francisco, took communion, was transformed, and created a food pantry from the same table where she first received bread.

The section on confirmation follows Evans to St. Bernard Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Alabama, where she attended mass and prayed in silence. She reflects that each church she has belonged to stays with her. Two years after the Mission folded, Evans and Dan began attending St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. At the confirmation of friends Chris and Tiffany, she joined the congregation in reaffirming the baptismal covenant. She quotes the author Lauren Winner's friend Julian, who was told by her pastor father that confirmation is not a promise to believe forever but a promise that "this is the story you will wrestle with forever" (194).

In the section on anointing of the sick, Evans argues the church is called not to cure but to heal: to enter into others' pain and remain present. She profiles Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest in Nashville who founded Thistle Farms, a social enterprise employing women recovering from abuse, prostitution, addiction, and trafficking. She recounts her experience at the Gay Christian Network conference in Chicago, where she found the gathering more grounded in love than any other Christian event, and concludes that LGBT Christians have a special role in teaching the church how to tell the truth and wait for resurrection.

Evans describes a recurring cycle of outrage at evangelicalism followed by cynicism, then unexpected grace that draws her back. The 2014 controversy over World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization that briefly decided to hire people in same-sex marriages before reversing course under evangelical pressure, sent Evans into her deepest period of religious depression. She recognizes that cynicism numbs not only pain but also truth and joy, and that healing requires vulnerability.

In the section on marriage, Evans examines the Orthodox crowning ceremony, in which identical crowns are placed on the couple's heads to symbolize a small kingdom reflecting the Kingdom of God. She critiques Christian marriage books prescribing rigid gender roles, arguing marriage becomes holy through mutual love and self-sacrifice. After eleven years with Dan, what makes their marriage sacred is not the certificate but the way God appears in everyday moments.

Evans concludes by noting that Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God more than 100 times in the Gospels but mentioned church only twice. The church's purpose is to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom through ordinary things made holy. In a final epilogue written before dawn, she affirms that church is what happens when someone whispers, "Pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here" (258). She closes with an invitation to show up, open every door, and anticipate resurrection together.