a year of biblical womanhood by rachel held evans

When she died, Held Evans left behind 11,762 words of the unfinished manuscript, and her husband, Dan, asked Chu if he would finish the project. On this visit, some of Held Evans’s friends and family had assembled to celebrate the publication of Held Evans’s sixth book, “ Wholehearted Faith,” a posthumous memoir. “She’s one of the few spiritual teachers I’ve known who had the humility to regularly ask herself, ‘What if I’m wrong?’ ” “I think Rachel would be the first person to scoff at any attempt to beatify her,” Sarah Bessey, her friend, told me. Held Evans quickly became a major spiritual figure, appearing on television shows and serving as one of President Obama’s faith advisers. “She made Christianity seem like a decent place to be while you asked questions, rather than something you had to abandon to be free,” Kathryn Lofton, a professor of religious studies at Yale, said. With humility and openness, Held Evans helped reintroduce a mode of spiritual inquiry in America that was based in seeking mystery, not certainty.

“Every generation needs dissenters, and Rachel was a sharp, faithful prophet in our midst,” Anthea Butler, the author of “ White Evangelical Racism,” told me. To these earnest seekers, Held Evans became a patron saint. But the demographic was more varied than it seemed many evangelicals were leaving megachurches with praise bands and coffee bars, but not abandoning a belief in Jesus. Many were fleeing their churches-the portion of white evangelicals in the population dropped from twenty-three per cent to fourteen per cent between 20-and, to outsiders, their departure looked like the secularization of America.

Held Evans embodied a movement that emerged in the two-thousands among people who were becoming disillusioned with evangelicalism. The author of five popular books on Christianity, she employed self-deprecating wit and practical exegesis to critique the conservative evangelical subculture in which she was raised. “Sometimes you’ve got to make do with what you have,” he said.Īlthough she was only thirty-seven when she died, Held Evans had become a beloved figure in the landscape of American religion. He had brought a wheeled suitcase in which he had packed sauces wrapped in newspaper, and the Chinese greens and mushrooms that he feared would be nearly impossible to find in Chattanooga. He had travelled to Chattanooga to prepare dinner that evening for twenty close friends and family members of Rachel Held Evans, an influential Christian thinker and writer, who died unexpectedly in 2019. Chu, who is forty-four and slender, had learned to cook family-style Chinese meals from his mother and paternal grandmother. He was scouring the produce section for lemongrass and galangal. On a recent Saturday morning, Jeff Chu, a writer and ordinand in the Reformed Church in America-a small Protestant denomination-pushed a green grocery cart through a Whole Foods in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

A year of biblical womanhood by rachel held evans