Nobody Has Clean Hands

The late Rachel Held Evans reminds us that the church is the perfect place for the weak and doubting, not the strong and confident. 

When Rachel Held Evans, a wife and mother of two small children, died on May 4, 2019, at the age of 37, it was not just her family, friends and acquaintances who were saddened. Thousands of people across the nation who’d never met her face to face also felt a deep sense of loss. The bond was forged because of what Evans had written about the Christian faith in her popular blog and books.

Such was the power of her words about moving from the evangelical faith of her youth to a progressive stance on Christianity that a writer for The Christian Century called her “the most influential mainline theologian of her generation, the C.S. Lewis of her time.” While Evans herself was neither trained nor credentialed in religious studies, and was not ordained and never pastored a church, she influenced many people who entered the ministry, especially women.

Although she was raised in a conservative Christian home and environment and as a teen embraced that expression of...