Kate Bowler: Have you ever felt the sting of church hurt? How about the ache of disillusionment? Or do you ever ask yourself, hey, is there even still room for me in a faith that I once held very dear? If any of these things ring true, this conversation is just for you. My name is Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. I asked my friend and fellow Canadian, Sarah Bessey, to join me for this delicate topic on this delicate week. Sarah, of course, is a writer and speaker, and by her own admission, a church lady at heart. Sarah grew up in evangelical and charismatic churches, and if that sounds like just gibberish to you, that is absolutely okay, professor Kate is here reporting for duty. Evangelicalism is not just a denomination. It’s an umbrella term for a movement that is very Bible-focused, very conversion-focused and very focused on the death and resurrection of Jesus as salvation for your sins. And about 40% of Americans have found themselves in the evangelical tradition at one point or another. Charismatic churches are a form of evangelicalism that emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit. People in a charismatic tradition might believe that when they speak that they are speaking in another spiritual language – it’s called speaking in tongues – or maybe that God is performing an actual miracle like a healing. Now, like all religions everywhere and all traditions everywhere, these faith movements have their limitations and complications. And like so many others, Sarah found herself wrestling with what parts of her faith she wanted to keep. what parts were okay to leave behind. Sarah co-founded Evolving Faith. It’s a gathering for spiritual wanderers, seekers, and question-askers, alongside her very good friend, the late and beloved Rachel Held Evans. Rachel was so very loved as a voice for the weary and the wondering. Someone who gave permission to wrestle with faith without losing it. So the work of Evolving Faith has continued to create spaces for people who find themselves feeling like they’re in the wilderness, wondering if they still belong. How fitting that we are having this conversation during Holy Week, the griefiest week in the Church calendar. This is the week we sit in the sorrow, anticipating the death of Jesus before we celebrate the resurrection. And this conversation names what I hold dearest about Holy Week—that we follow a God who doesn’t bypass suffering, but a God who sits with us in our grief. So if you’re someone who isn’t sure what to do now with a faith you were raised in, or maybe if what I’m describing is not your faith of origin, there’s just this thing, right? Sometimes we miss the churches of our childhood or we’re just trying to figure out how to keep pieces that are cherishable, but there are some things we need to let go of. And today Sarah invites us to ask all of the delicate questions. How do we honor where we’ve been without staying stuck? How can we make peace with what we’ve lost? And is there a home for us in the language of faith? I’m someone who loves question askers, and I know you are too. You’re gonna love this conversation. So Sarah, thanks so much for doing this with me.
Sarah Bessey: Thank you so much for letting me be here. I feel really excited. Nervous and excited.
Kate: We have such a high curiosity, interest, but like investment in a certain kind of faith that other people are very quick to dismiss and I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that deep inside of us, doesn’t God just want to make us happy, healthy, wealthy? That’s something that you have a lot of experience with in the heartest of your hearts.
Sarah: Yeah, I think so. I think, again, you and I have a lot of overlapping, you know, kind of history, you know growing up in the prairies I think formatively builds you into this type of person. But I think there’s this other element, too, of like just the religious environments that we kind of were pickled in, perhaps, that also had sort of some of those influences. And I know for me, I, you, know, came up in faith communities that were really heavily influenced by the American Prosperity Gospel, by the Word of Faith movements, which, of course, you have studied, and so I am the anthropological zoo for all of your theories. So I mean, the 80s and early 90s were pretty wild in terms of the charismatic renewal movements. I think sometimes now looking back on it, maybe the bigger miracle is that we still love Jesus and we still hung around. And it’s one of those things where I can look at it and say, you know, with maybe some level of complexity of saying, yeah, there was some really real and beautiful things in the midst of all of that. And it was deeply formative. And in a lot of times, it was sincere. I mean, it could be very sincerely wrong, but it was often very sincere. And there was almost this playfulness to it. I think sometimes part of the reason why that was that way in Canada is because so many of us were first-generation believers. And so we were almost untethered from a lot of tradition. Like most of our churches in our cities were empty. And so the fact that we were all at the Regina Leisure Center, where church smelled more like chlorine from the pool and sounded more like floor hockey than it did like smells and bells, it gave you a lot of room for things like, speaking in tongues and prayer and even audaciousness and possibility that feels kind of as sweet to me as it does feel complicated at times.
Kate: Was that part of your faith, the very big prosperity-type hopes for health, wealth, and happiness, was that really reinforced when you first moved to the States? I kind of remember that you were, this was like maybe, maybe the prosperity Sarah Hay Day.
Sarah: Yeah for sure.
Kate: When you moved to the states you went straight to the hotbed right? You went to Oral Roberts University.
Sarah: I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma at Oral Roberts University, yes absolutely. The prayer tower, the whole scheduled revival every year, forged in the fires of healing evangelism. Listen, I’ve got some street cred in this world. But I think that that was, there was something really about yearning there and about longing. And I think there was something that a lot of us were attracted to, which was, it’s really hard to be a person. And in some ways I felt like some of the gifts that I had from that movement, it took a while to find them on the other side, but looking back now, all these years later, I have this sense of like, I’m really glad that it gave me such a beautiful view of God. That it gave this view of of God that wasn’t angry and punishing and out to get you or wanting to teach you a lesson. That there was this God that was present in my life from the time that I came to faith in elementary school all the way through then that really did genuinely believe that God loved us. and that that meant something good for you. And what that means now to me maybe looks very different, but I’m grateful I never had to kind of undo what is it I actually believe about the nature and the character of God. Granted, we did not know how to feel our feelings. We did not, we do not know how to be a person. We did know what to do when you inevitably got sick or life happened and those sorts of things. So, I mean, you find the gaps that kind of can exist within that theology really quickly. The second you become someone who’s part of that company of people with unanswered prayers, you run up headlong into the walls that that sort of theology creates. But there were some things about it still that I’m glad for.
Kate: I always remember that being my very favorite thing about interviewing people who spent a really long time like marinating in any very Holy Spirit-y situation is they felt really loved and they felt that there was like, that God cared about every part of their biography. But I just, I always came away with it thinking, how beautiful is it to feel like if you write your memoir, it’s really always a story about how insanely loved and attended to you were. And as somebody who often feels like lonely or scrapping it out, that was a really, a thing I wanted to hold on to.
Sarah: I think you’re right. I think that maybe the shift that we, the necessary shift that many of us have needed to make is realizing that God is not just present in those great winning moments, right? Because I think that’s initially how maybe we thought, we thought that God, because God loved you and God wanted you whole and healthy and prosperous and body, mind and soul and spirit, so when you weren’t, you know, because we didn’t come up in a faith that was like, well, that was God. God gave you cancer, God gave you this, God is teaching you a lesson, whatever else. The natural flip side of that coin was, well, then you’re the problem. You lack faith, you’re like, what are you not getting right? Because clearly God is not gonna fail you because there’s all this love and this presence and there’s this deep intimate knowledge of you and your life and that sort of thing. And so then you are left with this, well, I’m the bad thing, I am the broken thing. And I think that’s one of the invitations maybe we have is realizing that the love of God isn’t dependent on control and on having everything go the way that you wanted it to and what does it look like to find the presence of God in the deepest, loneliest deserts and wildernesses of what it means to be a person.
Kate: You met a Brian.
Sarah: I did. And I kept him.
Kate: You both teamed up in ministry in a way that was really full and… like big wild years, it sounds like.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, Brian and I met when we were really young at Oral Roberts University. And we had all these ideas of what we thought life would kind of look like. You know, we thought he was called to full-time vocational ministry. I was always kind of working more in the corporate world. And yeah, life just kind of has unfolded. So we’ve been together 25 years now and it looks completely different. I think some of the biggest things that shock people who have known us our whole lives is that I’m the one…
Kate: Guess who’s in full-time ministry, it’s me, Sarah.
Sarah: And you know, and Brian’s found himself in business for the last, you know more than 15 years and you know has really built kind of a very different life than maybe what he would have initially thought. And yet it’s been really fun to shift from growing up together to now growing older together, which is really lovely.
Kate: That’s nice.
Sarah: I think so.
Kate: One of the ways that you both grew up together, and then it sounds like you’ve found a different path together, is really navigating how much the churches you hope to serve were heartbreakers. I wonder if you could tell me a bit about the season of disillusionment that you went through.
Sarah: I think that that’s a thing that a lot of us have kind of weathered over the years. And I think especially in the last 15, 10 years, I feel like it’s been increasing. I mean, especially walking alongside of folks through the Evolving Faith community, it is remarkable to me how many times people who are still a part of institutional religion or of a church or an intentional community of any sort have assumptions about why people maybe crash out of those communities. Um, almost all of them felt left.
Kate: Yes.
Sarah: And there is this sense of like, there’s this feeling of alienation or of loss. There’s a tremendous amount of grief. I think that that’s one of the things that we’ve experienced. I mean, I remember having this moment in my early thirties, realizing almost every church and almost everyone there has been someone in leadership who has experienced some sort of. experience of crashing, whether it was emotional or it was spiritual or it was relational, usually relational, and just being like, I don’t think we’re doing this really well. I think that there’s something actually in the base code setting of how we’re doing this that is ruining people. And it’s not just ruining people in the pews, it’s ruining people who are trying to run it and trying to be faithful often. And at the end of the day, you know this probably better than anybody. I’m just a church lady. Like, I just love the local church. And I love it because it’s so beautiful when it’s beautiful. And I even love it for the mess now. And so, yeah, I’ve been holding on no matter kind of what happens. And yet, there’s no part of me that doesn’t understand why people don’t. And there’s even that part of that’s like, why. You know, but there’s something I find really compelling and beautiful about trying to be faithful together. And sometimes that looks differently than other times. Sometimes it looks less organized than other times. There’s been huge swaths of my life where I’ve needed to take years away from church. I think that there is something compelling about trying be faithful togther and having people alongside of you. I don’t think it always has to look like formal church anymore. I don’ think it has to look the way that it always did, or the way that you’ve always been taught it had to be. I think there’s a lot of different ways we can find belonging and find community and find places to practice being good to one another and practice what we hope for, what we help is true about the kingdom of God. I hope so anyway.
Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. You started this community for people who don’t always belong in other communities with your gorgeous friend, Rachel Held Evans. I wondered if you could tell me about how that started and who she is.
Sarah: Yeah, sure. So Rachel was a writer, like myself. She had written a number of books and she was a leader that people really trusted. Not only in this space, but I think particularly in American evangelicalism and a particular experience, I think that a lot of folks kind of shared. And her and I were just always friends. We had found each other online. We had very different lived experiences and yet we just really loved each other, and so we just held on. And so we wrote alongside of each other, got up to a lot of mischief like to give some grief to the gospel coalition online every once in a while, chase a few people around. And so, I mean, we had a lot fun, right? And we had this idea of like, well, what if we put together like a weekend for people like us, people who have found themselves in this season of. faith shift or questioning or doubting or wondering, you know, does this, you know I feel like I’ve lost everything, all the answers I used to have and now I’m not really sure what even that means on the other side of this. And we thought we would just like to put together a weekend together, kind of almost more as a retreat. So we had this moment like really early when we started putting it together and I was like, I just don’t think anybody’s gonna come. I said like, it’s gonna be you and me and, jim, who Jim Chafee was our booking agent, he was helping us with the operations and logistics. And I was like, it’s gonna be three of us just kind of sitting in the room. And she was like don’t be silly, there’ll be at least 200 people there, like, or 500 people there and we’ll be fine. And I’m like, 500 people, like that’s a revival for me right in Canada. And so we just had like, we had 1500 people show up in a space meant for 900. I remember us looking at each other backstage a lot with like this mix of like excitement and joy, but also like terror. Cause we were like, I think we severely underestimated the hunger that people had for these conversations. We really underestimated the longing that people had for community, but also for the conversations we were hosting around a lot of these issues that people felt like they were the only ones who cared or who were noticing, whether it was around you know, issues around justice, around decolonization, around purity culture, around how you read the Bible, you know around how show up in community. Science, right, was a really big aspect of all of that as well. And so, I mean, those sorts of conversations. And so that’s, we came home from that first weekend and we just kind of were like, well, I think we should start a thing. And of course, neither one of us really had a clue how to do that, I still don’t. And we built out this whole three to five-year plan together that turned into what Evolving Faith is now, you know, conference and podcast. And there’s a huge online community of, like, thousands of people who walk through life together. We really wanted to emphasize spiritual formation and care for people as opposed to just shoveling more content and resources or offering a hot take on every single thing that came across the desk. We were really wanting to like shepherd and care for people. And that following spring, Rachel got sick and died very unexpectedly. That was five years ago now. And we kept going. Jeff Chu came alongside. He was a really close friend of Rachel’s. And I think one of the last great gifts that Rachel gave me was my friendship with Jeff. So we led it together for a number of years. He stepped away a couple of years ago. And it’s been really beautiful to be a part of. One thing that I remember talking with Rachel’s widower, Dan, about a lot was how much she would have hated if we had turned Evolving Faith into like a shrine for her. Like she just would have been the very first person in line to be like, well, that’s crap. The amount of times I can hear her yelling at me in my brain still to this day. And yet I feel like we’ve honored her pretty well in that space. And it still feels a lot like her to me. And it’s been a really lovely place to channel some of that grief. And I think, too, it’s meant that we have a lot of shared understanding. People really loved Rachel. And there were a lot us who grieved really, really hard when we lost her. And people would come up to me and say, I don’t even know why I’m crying so hard. I never met her. Or her work meant a lot to me. And it’s like, I don’t know when we decided whose grief gets to count. Like it’s still… that mattered a lot to me. And I think it was also lumped in with a lot of grief people had about their politics and their churches and their communities and their families of origin and the amount of loss that so many people have experienced. And so walking through that together and holding on to one another and learning how to lament well together and not paper over it with all the spiritual bypassing garbage like you and I have talked about so much meant that it became a really sacred space.
Kate: There’s a history that hasn’t been written about like how evangelicals and then ex-evangelicals even began to be called ex-evangelical because you were like right in the thick of this of people who like had been given a fully formed pretty overwhelming subculture and then still wanted to stay faithful, but there wasn’t a new thing yet.
Sarah: No, there wasn’ t. And there wasn’t a whole lot of us who were talking about it really publicly, especially 15 years ago, right? Or even 20 years ago when I very first started writing online. And when I first started writing online 20 years ago, I was still in like the white-hot center of my own, what now I would know is deconstruction, but at the time I didn’t have language like that. And it is profoundly lonely, right? And I think that’s one of the reasons why Rachel and I decided we wanted to take a run at Evolving Faith was because we knew that this was a profoundly unshepherded season of life, but also a really lonely one. And so just even having other people alongside of you who are able to say you’re right in the right spot, you’re not the bad thing, you’re the broken thing because you’re seeing all of these inconsistencies or you have these doubts, not from a position of arrogance, but almost from a place of like love and grief, right? And so being able to be alongside of other people where you feel just a little less alone.
Kate: You use gentle language for people, like evolving faith, for example, instead of deconstruction.
Sarah: For sure. I don’t even really use ex-vangelical because I never really felt like I identified fully with the evangelical, the American evangelical movement. And so even that never felt quite online. And whereas I think part of the reason why we always really liked, well part of the reason we pulled out the word evolving is Rachel and I had been writers alongside of each other for a lot of years and we realized like, oh, this is a word that’s showing up a lot for us. And we liked it because it implied to us that we got to hang on to the things that we still loved. That we got to have some sort of rootedness in this story that still meant a lot to us. And Rachel used to say that any evolving faith is just a faith that’s adapted in order to survive. And there’s even this sense of like movement to it and teachability and openness. I just kind of wonder sometimes if some of the panic that I hear from institutional church around people who are experiencing an evolving face or a faith shift or deconstruction or whatever you want to call it, I genuinely have wondered if they’re missing that this is the answer to their prayers and the longings for revival that characterize so much of the 80s and the 90s. And so I think that there was this element of like, maybe, maybe this is it. Like there’s this real beauty to it. I see such a renewal almost happening in people. And even if the ways that they are pursuing God, and the ways that they’re pursuing justice, or the ways they’re seeking to embody what they believe and hope is true about God, looks so different than maybe what their elders or their communities have ever known. There’s something really compelling and beautiful about it, I think.
Kate: So you’re like, please don’t, don’t be, we don’t need to be as scared.
Sarah: No, God, no, I think especially now that I’m 20 years kind of into a lot of this work and even into my own experiences with an evolving faith, it wasn’t a one and done experience in my early 20s. I wouldn’t be nice, you know, it’s like, this is, this is what spiritual formation looks like. And oftentimes even those seasons of wilderness or longing or silence, they often are altars where we are meeting with God in ways we never expected or anticipated or wanted.
Kate: You’re totally right, Sarah. I have not thought about that as like these moments of undoing as moments where you’re forced to stop and pray.
Sarah: I think there’s always an invitation for intimacy there with God. And I think sometimes one of the worst things we’ve maybe been taught during those the last, you know, generation, well, maybe not the worst thing, but one thing I think is that’s profoundly unhelpful is the idea of certainty or arrival, right? That somehow you just are done or that you should believe the same things at 45 that you did at 15, right? And it’s like, even if you’re not. changing and growing and evolving in response to God, but also in response to your life, you’re missing it. That’s genuinely not the point.
Kate: I find that so refreshing because otherwise we feel changed as in like just kicked out of things that used to be comforting.
Sarah: I think so. I did a tremendous amount of deep diving on this, I think mainly for, originally for my own self, right? Like, am I broken? Am I bad? Am i losing the thing that has shaped my whole life and that I have loved, which is Jesus? Am l losing, am I going to lose my community forever? And in some ways, yeah, I did. I Did lose communities and I lost a lot of relationships and I lost A lot of things along the way. My story is the same as everybody else’s in that regard. But I think the thing that I realized as I was learning and paying more attention to theologians and academics and people, there was this idea of like, well, yeah, you’ve got all these different stages of development just like you do for becoming a person as you do in faith. And I remember, I think it was Dr. James Fowler who talks about like six stages of faith. And he talked about how most of our faith communities are set up to function at that stage of literalism. And like, if this, then that. And here’s the insiders and here’s outsiders. and doesn’t it feel so good to be an insider? And when you shift out of that stage of faith, which is a very normal thing, all of a sudden you’re like, well, how do I fit in this community where I don’t feel that way any longer, or I don’t look at things like that, and all of the sudden it made a lot more sense. It began to feel less like it was like a pathological problem within me, and more like, no, I think this is just kind of how the community’s set up, and that’s okay too. It’s for a stage, it’s not the stage I’m in.
Kate: There are so many people who feel like when they get to that place of uncertainty or doubt or even just really not wanting to go anymore to church, then they feel like there might not be anything left. Like there couldn’t be a deeper thing that it’s pulling them into. And I really like the idea that as we change, that there are different sort of lovely areas of spiritual growth we can still move into.
Sarah: Absolutely.
Kate: And you can see it in other people, but that sort of unsurprised at all the shenanigans, reading the news about another megachurch scandal and bad behavior and going, wow, I bet you’re about six months away from restoring that person back to leadership. Like that kind of knowingness feels… also like wisdom, it’s not fun, but it feels like we are grownups. And maybe this comes to especially because we’re also always trying to parent or think about the next generation’s faith. It’s just always trying to figure out like which thing, if I could describe it differently, what I wanna hand back to you. And that is like, that’s also a deep, that’s like a deepening. That couldn’t have happened with like adolescent Sarah and adolescent Kate.
Sarah: No, not at all. Not at all, I’m amazed by how many things I used to have big opinions about that I don’t care about anymore. It’s so refreshing! I think that that maybe is like part of the shift. And I’ve seen this in a number of people, and especially people who are a bit further up the path for me in a way that really excites me and makes me feel really excited about the next stage of life, which is just like, I think when you very first kind of enter the wilderness or you very enter that season of deconstruction or whatever you wanna call it, you’re just searching for like the nearest shelter of certainty you can find. And so you wanna trade your original answers for new and better answers. But you’ve still got the casing of fundamentalist evangelicalism, whatever it is, right? So you’re just like, well, now I’m just going to believe this even harder and create new litmus tests and new purity tests and ways of knowing who’s in and who’s out. New black and white rules, right. And I think that’s a very normal formative thing. I look back on my know-it-all years, which happened to coincide with young motherhood with, like, I’m so glad nobody read anything I wrote for the first nine years of my career.
Kate: Did you have a lot of answers?
Sarah: Oh so many answers, so many thoughts, so many beliefs, so many things I did really hard for like a month. And so that’s part of it, right? And so then at a certain point, all of a sudden, you’re like, well, you can knock yourself out figuring out exactly what theory of atonement you believe in right now, or eventually you get to the point where you’re like, I can see a lot of different things that are at play here, and I don’t really know exactly what 100% it is, but I know it was enough.
Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. My parents have this really nice church they’re going to and they’ve got a pastor who kind of comes in swinging with these really intense sermons. And when he comes in, they gotta home and sit quietly for a while, and I’ve never seen them respond to service like that. The other day, my dad was like, well the pastor today was really explaining how we don’t actually have, I mean Christians that is, have a very convincing explanation for the problem of evil and the whole thing was really about how that’s mostly just a blank space that we’ve put theories into. He’s in a really smart, kind church and I was like, you know, I’ve actually never heard uncertainty preached about that. And I was, like, how did it feel? They’re like, it was great.
Sarah: That’s refreshing.
Kate: How nice to just move into a season where we’re unknowing certain things. It feels really satisfying than pretending to know.
Sarah: I think sometimes that’s maybe the painful part is all the unlearning part, that at first it feels like a lot of loss. It feels like lot of stripping away. It feels losing a lot your answers or all of your certainties. I think, I remember feeling like I was so sure that everything that I believed was my building this thing on a rock. And it turned out it was all sand in the end. And so what was I left with? And so I think that’s where you begin to sort of have some of the room for even the possibilities of not having all those answers, of not requiring certainty, of having a lot of room, even for other people’s experiences in the midst of all of it. But it can take a while for people to get to where your parents were, right? Of saying it felt really good to acknowledge that we don’t have everything figured out.
Kate: I do find that some kinds of religious certainty is still like, it really gets to me.
Sarah: Oh, it’s addictive.
Kate: Especially when it’s an area I feel like I know a lot about, and no one is listening to me on this topic. It is hard. It’s hard to be compassionate. I’m not loving being compassionate. I’m feeling very compassionate. I just feel mostly dissparing that the loudest voices in popular religion are the most vitriolic or they’re lying. Like four-step plans. That’s just lying. And that also makes me insane.
Sarah: I think especially too, once you get a little bit behind the curtain, and you realize how much uncertainty actually exists in the people peddling certainty. It’s quite a disorienting thing, for sure. I remember really early in my very first kind of rounds of deconstruction being like, I literally cannot call myself a Christian anymore. Because it doesn’t mean the same thing to me anymore. And I think that sometimes our souls need that room and that’s okay too. I remember being really drawn during that season to being like, I think I’m just gonna call myself a follower of Jesus. It’s funny to me now, looking back years later, because it’s like, it’s supposed to be the same thing. It’s supposed be, but it felt like a huge difference in my soul of what that actually was, because I had so identified Christianity with particular political and theological positions and ways of moving through the world that I did not identify with in any way any longer, and fully rejected. And so I was like, great, I’ll be a follower of Jesus. This will be what it is. And then I remember having this moment, literally in my house being like, well, I should probably figure out what that means. Like, the whole Christianity part of it, the actual, like, what is, who is Jesus? What is this thing I’m actually following if it’s not this? I should figure out probably what that is. And of course, me being me, it’s, I’m Protestant and charismatic, so it’s going to be like, well, go to the Bible and it’ll be sloppy and experiential and deeply personal. And so all of that got thrown in during that period, but I think a lot of us kind of do run up against that feeling of like, not this. I think that’s a good starting point. You may not know what it is you want to be for yet, but you’ve begun to identify not this or what you’re against. But I think sometimes part of the problem that we run into when we’re experiencing an evolving faith is we stop there. We stop at the against and we don’t keep pushing through to see what invitation is of what is it that I want to be for. What is it that I wanna lean into? What is the thing that I want to practice? What is a thing I wanna embody that would be hopeful and good and filled with love in the world? No matter what you name it or call it. I don’t wanna stop at just being against things. I wanna learn and lean into what I wanna be for. Which I think gets to some of the stuff we’ve talked about a lot around that, that next generation around raising our children. If I’m not giving them this container for God and I want do what Meredith Ann Miller talks about, give them a faith that they don’t have to heal from.
Kate: Give them a faith they don’t have to heal from.
Sarah: That’s the bar we’re trying to clear right now. And so there’s this element of, what do you want to be for? What is it you’re dreaming about? What is that you think that God’s dreaming about for the world? What do you think it would actually look like? And how do we move into that space of what do I want to be for? I want to be for love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and even possibly self-control. I want things like justice in the world. I want, you know, goodness, not just for me but for my neighbors. And so that’s a path. Maybe it’s not this, but it could be this.
Kate: So one of the things I wanted to keep is, and this is the, I guess, one of things I learned when I was sick is, I really wanted to keep the experience of lent, going up to Jesus’ death as being the annual practice. Where, cause we have seasons of ups and downs and we sometimes we’re in the really joyful season, but then it’s lent. and then sometimes we’re in the really sad season and then it’s lent. Yeah, but like that way. Every year everyone could practice the kind of belonging that comes from knowing that we’re all going to need to be saved. We’re all gonna need to be carried and that we needed an example of overwhelming love and the conquering of death. That is one thing that’s really stuck in the aftertimes for me. I want that. I’m always like, with me and my son, I’m like, well Zach, like, those people who love God, we’re losers by cultural standards. And he’s like, what?
Sarah: Come sit next to all of us who are despised.
Kate: That’s gonna be great.
Sarah: I remember having a moment, I think this is one that I look back on now and recognize it as being a bigger moment than I did at the time. And it was around Ash Wednesday and Lent. I was in like a really deep season of grief. We had experienced like miscarriage after miscarridge and our church was falling apart and I was young and it just felt like the end of everything. And I remember driving by this Episcopal church in San Antonio for weeks on my way to work. And then one day on a Wednesday, I saw the church parking lot was packed and I don’t even know why now. I just pulled in and I went in and I just felt so out of sorts. Like I just, I existed in this narrative of sunshine that had to be relentless and never ending and answers for everything. And all of my answers were ash. And so I pulled in and it was an Ash Wednesday service and they were doing the full liturgy of like ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But they also had so much scripture and so much liturgee around sorrow and around darkness and around loss. And that very thing that you were saying there. And I remember feeling like this dislocated joint in my soul just went back into spot where I was like, oh, I think God’s in the dark too. I think God’s in the grief. I think, God’s with me when I’m wrapping up what I hoped would be a baby in a tea towel. I think god’s with me here. And I think God’s with me when I am really sad about what our pastor did. And I thank God’s with me when I really disappointed in how the Christians around me are voting about immigrants. And I don’t think I have to lose Jesus. I think Jesus is right here in this. And that was a huge thing for me, which is kind of a funny thing to look back on and be like, you come from this certainty and this narrative of victory and this sunshiny version of Christianity and it’s like, what helped me hang on to Jesus, what help me hold on to what I hope is true about the gospel, was that. It was finding people like you and holding hands across the thing and being like, God is with us when we are really sad.
Kate: You’ve done such a good job of like, it’s just, I really love hearing you think about, especially about belonging. Like you’re, you’re the best person I know on belonging. You really are. Cause you’ve been so good about saying like, do you feel terrible? You still belong. You feel like you want a little bit more certainty because actually Christianity has beautiful resources on this. You still belonged. Like you’ve been the, like grabber puller inner person for me and for so many people.
Sarah: Thank you.
Kate: You always having language for the different kinds of feeling kicked out is very satisfying.
Sarah: It’s just nice to feel named, I think, right? I think for all of us anyway. I mean, I that’s probably been one of the best revelations on the other side of deconstruction that has continued to deepen for me. It’s realizing, God, we are so loved. And there’s just no place you can wander away from God’s love. I feel like this is the thing that I know deepest, and sometimes that’s hard to articulate. I’m just like, God’s love is just wider and more welcoming and more beautiful and tougher and more inclusive, more gorgeous, more real than I think I ever would have imagined or hoped. And so there’s a lot of room. There’s just a lot of room. And I think that sometimes our exercises and boundary markers and who’s in and who out and what counts and what doesn’t count is cute. It’s adorable. It feels like playground games sometimes when it’s just like look at the look at what we are in the midst of.
Kate: This has been an absolute joy. I love your brain, I love you heart, but also I just wanna be in all the clubs that you make. Thanks, hon.
Sarah: Oh, thank you.
Kate: As Sarah reminds us, there’s something deeply compelling about the shared effort to build community, to show up for one another, to live out our faith together despite the messiness, despite the imperfections. So if you find yourself in that paradox, the tension of loving something that’s let you down, or of still feeling like church ladies at heart, even when you’ve had to reimagine what church looks like, here is a blessing for you. Blessed are you. standing in the tension of a once sturdy faith turned to ash, and the hope that something new, something more honest and true, might be born. In this new landscape, may you practice the courage to find the others who make space for your questions without easy answers, who celebrate doubt when it makes room for more faith, who search high and low for a defiant hope borne amidst despair. Bless you, dear one. You who don’t give up wrestling. You who have eyes to see something new being rebuilt on top of what was. So wherever you find yourself today, in certainty or doubt, in belonging or exile, know this. There is no place where you could go that is outside of God’s love. No place too far, no wound too deep, no question too heavy. God is with us. And may that be enough for today.
Kate: All right, my darlings, it is the tail end of Lent. But hey, if you want a daily practice for Holy Week, join us. Download it for free at katebowler.com/lent. Any big thank you to our funding partners, Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School. And to the team behind everything happening at Everything Happens. Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azario, Katherine Smith, and Megan Cronkleton. Thank you. And this is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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