Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans Narrated by Rachel Held Evans

Overview

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 community
• Christianity isn't a kingdom for the worthy--it's a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfect
• The 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/23/2015
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. Agent: Rachel Gardner, Books & Such Literary Agency. (Apr.)

Library Journal

05/15/2015
Evans's (Faith Unraveled; A Year of Biblical Womanhood) latest volume stems from a continuing search for a suitable worship context. Contemporary literature in spirituality can often contain a lot of works that seek or try to create a jazzy and accessible approach to Jesus or church life; Evans's take is different: "Millennials aren't looking for a hipper Christianity. We're looking for a truer Christianity." The book is structured around the traditional seven sacraments, which Evans suggests deliver particular messages—that the church can welcome, unite, and feed those who attend. The author's approach is stylish and verges on the literary, and her graceful strategy is refreshingly distinct; she ends as she begins, with a sense of the goodness and nearness of God. VERDICT Elegantly structured and thoughtfully written, Evans's approach to church through the metaphors of the sacraments should please many reading groups and individual seekers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171192549
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,158,791

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