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This path of lament is a well-worn one for me, so for the next forty days, I’ll be taking to social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and here on the blog—to share quotes, music, books, podcast episodes, prayers, and other resources that have been especially helpful to me in acknowledging the wounding of the church (both personally and systemically) and working toward healing (both personally and systemically). If you want to read along, I’ll be drawing most heavily from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith by Lisa Sharon Harper, Mae Elise Cannon, Troy Jackson, and Soong-Chan Rah, Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor, and Searching for Sunday by Yours Truly. This path of lament is a well-worn one for me, so for the next forty days, I’ll be taking to social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and here on the blog—to share quotes, music, books, podcast episodes, prayers, and other resources that have been especially helpful to me in acknowledging the wounding of the church (both personally and systemically) and working toward healing (both personally and systemically). If you want to read along, I’ll be drawing most heavily from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith by Lisa Sharon Harper, Mae Elise Cannon, Troy Jackson, and Soong-Chan Rah, Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor, and Searching for Sunday by Yours Truly.

I am a messy and embodied person, and this is a messy and embodied faith.”“I am a Christian,” declared Austin Channing Brown, an author and activist whose work focuses on racial justice in the church, “because God knows my pain, not in an abstract way, but in a real, bloody, enfleshed way.”“I am a Christian,” said Rachel Murr, a researcher and counselor, “because the gospel is good news for gay people too.”“I I choose to live as if the things Jesus died for were worthy of God’s sacrifice and therefore worthy of mine.”We were a diverse group: evangelical and Lutheran, Baptist and Episcopalian, Latina and black and white and Indian and Korean, high church and low church, Catholic and Protestant, Reformed and Methodist, straight and gay and bisexual and transgender, pastors and scholars, writers and activists, crunchy dreadlocked mamas, tattooed and foul-mouthed priests, sweet-talkin’ southerners, and stiletto-boasting fashionistas. I am a messy and embodied person, and this is a messy and embodied faith.”“I am a Christian,” declared Austin Channing Brown, an author and activist whose work focuses on racial justice in the church, “because God knows my pain, not in an abstract way, but in a real, bloody, enfleshed way.”“I am a Christian,” said Rachel Murr, a researcher and counselor, “because the gospel is good news for gay people too.”“I I choose to live as if the things Jesus died for were worthy of God’s sacrifice and therefore worthy of mine.”We were a diverse group: evangelical and Lutheran, Baptist and Episcopalian, Latina and black and white and Indian and Korean, high church and low church, Catholic and Protestant, Reformed and Methodist, straight and gay and bisexual and transgender, pastors and scholars, writers and activists, crunchy dreadlocked mamas, tattooed and foul-mouthed priests, sweet-talkin’ southerners, and stiletto-boasting fashionistas.

To the people who first read the Bible, they were as real as the imperial soldiers who marched down their streets, the royal edicts that threatened their homes and livelihoods, and the heavy fear that crept into every fitful dream, every visit to the market, every hushed conversation about what to do if the emperor demanded their worship or their death.“The point of apocalyptic texts is not to predict the future,” explained biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine in The Meaning of the Bible; “it is to provide comfort in the present. We must listen too to Rev. William Barber of North Carolina, who, though he struggles with a severe arthritic spinal condition and bursitis in his left knee, has marched and preached for decades on civil rights, pressing upon elected leaders and private citizens alike the moral imperative to “shock this nation with the power of love.”I think also of my clergywomen friends, who, in the face of near-constant obstruction and all kinds of sexist double standards, preach the Word, run soup kitchens, anoint the sick, tend to the dying, sponsor refugees, get arrested at protests, and speak truth to power, day in and day out, with little thanks or praise. To the people who first read the Bible, they were as real as the imperial soldiers who marched down their streets, the royal edicts that threatened their homes and livelihoods, and the heavy fear that crept into every fitful dream, every visit to the market, every hushed conversation about what to do if the emperor demanded their worship or their death.“The point of apocalyptic texts is not to predict the future,” explained biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine in The Meaning of the Bible; “it is to provide comfort in the present. We must listen too to Rev. William Barber of North Carolina, who, though he struggles with a severe arthritic spinal condition and bursitis in his left knee, has marched and preached for decades on civil rights, pressing upon elected leaders and private citizens alike the moral imperative to “shock this nation with the power of love.”I think also of my clergywomen friends, who, in the face of near-constant obstruction and all kinds of sexist double standards, preach the Word, run soup kitchens, anoint the sick, tend to the dying, sponsor refugees, get arrested at protests, and speak truth to power, day in and day out, with little thanks or praise.

"If Love Can Look Like Genocide, Then Love Can Look Like Anything": An Excerpt from "Inspired" By Rachel Held Evans, on From Chapter 3: “War Stories” in Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking On Water, and Loving the Bible When I turned to pastors and professors for help, they urged me to set aside my objections, to simply trust that God is good and that the Bible’s war stories happened as told, for reasons beyond my comprehension.“God’s ways are higher than our ways,” they insisted. When you can’t trust your own God- given conscience to tell you what’s right, or your own God-given mind to tell you what’s true, you lose the capacity to engage the world in any meaningful, authentic way, and you become an easy target for authoritarian movements eager to exploit that vacuity for their gain. When I turned to pastors and professors for help, they urged me to set aside my objections, to simply trust that God is good and that the Bible’s war stories happened as told, for reasons beyond my comprehension.“God’s ways are higher than our ways,” they insisted.