Biblio Spotlight: Searching for Sunday
In 2012, I attended my seventh fall youth retreat at Eagle Eyrie Conference Center sponsored by the Virginia Annual Conference. Every year followed the same basic format, with occasional changes to spice things up. The band was the same almost every year and the speakers seemed all the same.
2012 was different. The speaker that year was Rachel Held Evans and she had recently published A Year of Biblical Womanhood and that was the topic of her talks over the weekend.
She talked about what it looks like when we take the Bible literally and go to extremes. She was warm and funny and was the first speaker I’d seen keep the attention of hundreds of middle schoolers while she spoke.
I knew that we didn’t have to read the Bible literally, they teach you that when you study religion in college, even in evangelical schools (at least back in the 1990s). But working in Christian Education, it seemed like all the curriculum supported a flat reading of the Bible. By the 2010s, it seemed that the so-called “high view” of Scripture was all people wanted, or knew about.
But there was Rachel, standing up at a Conference sponsored event describing how silly it is. The subtitle to that book is: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband 'Master,' which offers some insight into what to expect.
Was it okay to teach the youth to read the Bible critically? That’s what I was taught in college, but why don’t we help lay people do it?
As I read more of Rachel’s books, I became more and more convinced of how important it is to make the Bible more accessible to people who reject the literal interpretation. It’s too easy to reject the Bible altogether, but we don’t have to. The Bible is a rich and beautiful collection of writings by people who struggled with the same kinds of questions we have.
It took me a few more years of struggling with the concept of discipleship before I was ready to tackle the “high view” of Scripture teachings. Now I’ve come to believe that the “high view” of Scripture has resulted in a low view of Jesus which then created the soil that allowed White Christian Nationalism to grow.
I think back to that retreat as a turning point for me and my journey and I’m grateful that I got to hear her give that talk at both the middle school and the high school retreats.
It wasn’t until after she died that I read her book, Searching for Sunday: Love, Leaving, and Finding the Church, and discovered that she wrote about her experience at that retreat I attended. In writing this post, I found that those words were first written shortly after the retreat and are still available on her website.
If you’ve never read any of her work, her gift was in making you feel like you’re not alone in your doubts and questions. I would start with Searching for Sunday, but they’re all good reads.