Rachel Held Evans famous quotes

We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, and we can tell when somebody is just trying to sell us something. I think church is the last place I want to go to be sold another product.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Thinking #Trying #Church

What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Comfort #Poet

The Proverbs 31 woman is a star not because of what she does but how she does it—with valor. So do your thing. If it’s refurbishing old furniture—do it with valor. If it’s keeping up with your two-year-old—do it with valor. If it’s fighting against human trafficking . . . leading a company . . . or getting other people to do your work for you—do it with valor. Take risks. Work hard. Make mistakes. Get up the next morning. And surround yourself with people who will cheer you on.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Morning #Stars #Cheer

God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Way #Imagine #Compassionate

What I love about the ministry of Jesus is that he identified the poor as blessed and the rich as needy...and then he went and ministered to them both. This, I think, is the difference between charity and justice. Justice means moving beyond the dichotomy between those who need and those who supply and confronting the frightening and beautiful reality that we desperately need one another.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Beautiful #Jesus #Moving

Church attendance may be dipping, but God can survive the Internet age. After all, He knows a thing or two about resurrection.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Two #Church #Age

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Style #Church #Want

The woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Valor #Smallest

One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Christian #Mistake #Ironic

As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Christian #Motherhood #Calling

You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Jesus #Made #Noticing

I think maybe God was trying to tell me that gentleness begins with strength, quietness with security. A great tree is both moved and unmoved, for it changes with the seasons, but its roots keep it anchored in the ground. Mastering a gentle and quiet spirit didn’t mean changing my personality, just regaining control of it, growing strong enough to hold back and secure enough to soften.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Strong #Mean #Thinking

Faith isn't about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Voice #Quiet #Following

What makes the Gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Offensive

My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Mind #Interpretation

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Beautiful #Voice #Cacophony

I’m ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#War #Feet #Waging War

The truth is, a man can choose to objectify a woman whether she’s wearing a bikini or a burqa. We don’t stop lust by covering up the female form; we stop lust by teaching men to treat women as human beings worthy of respect.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Teaching #Men #Lust

Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Jesus #Men #Worry

From the baking aisle to the post office line to the wrapping paper bin in the attic, women populate every dark corner of Christmas. Who got up at 4 a.m. to put the ham in the oven? A woman. . . . Who sent the Christmas card describing her eighteen-year-old son's incarceration as 'a short break before college?' A woman. Who remembered to include batteries at the bottom of each stocking? A woman. And who gets credit for pulling it all off? Santa.That's right. A man.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Healing #Son #Dark

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God's justice, because it suggests that we have it backward - the mystery lies not in God's unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God's ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Lying #Love Is #Thinking

While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation. Justice is not a gift; it’s a lifestyle, a commitment to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam—‘repairing the world.’
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Commitment #Justice #Giving

I don't know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Christian #Fighting #Church

And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new--perhaps something better--into this world...We are each an Eve.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Daughter #Men #Blood

We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Jobs #Anthem #Description

When we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Biblical #Weapons #Adjectives

Ours is indeed a culture that tends to assign value to a woman based on her sex appeal rather than her character, and that’s something we must work to change.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Sex #Character #Culture

I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Mean #Assuming #Trouble

My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand... I think she's right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Thinking #Hands #Belief

God and the Gay Christian is a game changer. Prepare to be challenged and enlightened, provoked and inspired.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Christian #Gay #Games

Sometimes you have to be forced away from your work to realize youÂ’ve made too much of it, to remember it doesnÂ’t define you.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Work #Too Much #Remember

Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Wanted Someone #Wanted #Search For Truth

Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Mother #Religious #Voice

It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#People #Purpose #Agonizing

We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Letters #Spirit #Masters

If same-sex relationships are really sinful, then why do they so often produce good fruit-loving families, open homes, self-sacrifice, commitment, faithfulness, joy? And if conservative Christians are really right in their response to same-sex relationships, then why does that response often produce bad fruit-secrets, shame, depression, loneliness, broken families, and fear?
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Christian #Sex #Loneliness

Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Believe #Animal #Differences

Perhaps the most radical thing we followers of Jesus can do in the information age is treat each other like humans-not heroes, not villains, not avatars, not statuses, not Republicans, not Democrats, not Calvinists, not Emergents-just humans. This wouldn't mean we would stop disagreeing, but I think it would mean we would disagree well.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Jesus #Hero #Mean

Millennials aren't looking for a hipper Christianity. We're looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we're looking for Jesus-the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he's always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.
-- Rachel Held Evans

#Jesus #Wine #Community