Searching for Sunday
Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Find hope and grace when you are feeling cynical about the church and faith.
Are you struggling to connect with your church community? Do you find yourself questioning the core beliefs that you once held dear? Searching for Sunday, from New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans is a heartfelt ode to the past and a hopeful gaze into the future of what it means to be a part of the modern church.
Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals--to her, it was beginning to feel like church culture was too far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing Evans back to church.
Evans found herself wanting to better understand the church and find her place within it, so she set out on a new adventure. Within the pages of Searching for Sunday, Evans catalogs her journey as she loves, leaves, and finds the church once again.
Evans tells the story of her faith through the lens of seven sacraments of the Catholic church--baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, the anointing of the sick, and marriage--to teach us the essential truths about what she's learned along the way, including:
Faith isn't just meant to be believed, it's meant to be lived and shared in communityChristianity isn't a kingdom for the worthy--it's a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfectThe countless and beautiful ways that God shows up in the ordinary parts of our daily lives
Searching for Sunday will help you unpack the messiness of community, teaching us that by overcoming our cynicism, we can all find hope, grace, love, and, somewhere in between, church.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood) uses the lens of her own journey as an evangelical Christian to explore what is happening in church circles today and, more broadly, what it means to be part of a church community. Evans humorously describes her gradual evolution from a teenager with a "crusader complex" to an adult who became increasingly uncomfortable with her church's conservative theology: "The trouble started when I began to suspect God was less concerned with saving people from hell than I was." Dividing the book into sections named after sacraments, Evans begins by contemplating, in lyrical prose, the theological significance of each sacrament's key ingredient (water, bread, ash, etc.). A powerful storyteller, Evans captures transformative moments, such as leaving a church full "of kind, generous people"; investing wholeheartedly in a new church that "collapsed slowly, one week at a time"; and witnessing healing at the Gay Christian Network's conference, feeling "simultaneously furious at Christianity's enormous capacity to wound and awed by its miraculous capacity to heal." Honest and moving, this memoir is both theologically astute and beautifully written.
Customer Reviews
Thought provoking, wonderful.
So often, the journey of Christian faith is seen as a one way trip: from unknowing sinfulness to firm belief. In this book, Rachel Held Evans explores doubt, "what if we are making this up because we are afraid of death?". She does this through the lens of the sacraments (baptism, communion) applied to her own journey, from enthusiastic evangelical to reflective Episcopalian.
It's a thought provoking, wonderful book: Rachel's humour and compassion combined with well cast vignettes make for an engaging read. Rachel is clearly an experienced writer for the web, and is good at packaging her ideas in bite size chunks: the format of large section broken down into small sub chapters works well in its iBook edition.