12. Rachel Held Evans (Braving the Truth) with Sarah Bessey

12. Rachel Held Evans (Braving the Truth) with Sarah Bessey

Sarah Bessey joins Alexis Rice for a special release-day episode honoring Braving the Truth by Rachel Held Evans - out now.

Alexis and Sarah read from Rachel's book, reflect on holy anger, spiritual wilderness, life after evangelicalism many are living in real time, and why Rachel’s voice feels less like nostalgia and more like necessity.

Braving The Truth from @HarperCollins
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/braving-the-truth-rachel-held-evans

💬 In This Episode

• Reading: “Life After Evangelicalism” (originally posted Nov 14, 2016)
• Sarah on editing Rachel’s work: grief, time travel, and why this book feels like a gift “from the past for the future of the church”
• Reading: “Why I Can’t Stay Angry Even Though I Want To”
• Women, power, patriarchy — and why Rachel’s work was truly threatening (because it was making change)
• For the spiritually tender: you belong, and “there’s always room for more”

👥 People/Resources Mentioned

Rachel Held Evans: @rachelheldevans
Sarah Bessey: @sarahbessey
Evolving Faith: @evolvfaith
Glennon Doyle: @glennondoyle
Jen Hatmaker: @jenhatmaker
Jeff Chu: @jeffchu
Matthew Paul Turner: @matthewpaulturner
Brian McLaren: @brianmclaren
Pete Enns: @peteenns
Dan McClellan: @maklelan

🎙 Credits: “Come Thou Fount” used with permission by Sara Groves @grovesroad

#Christianity #deconstruction #RachelHeldEvans #BravingTheTruth

Transcript

Sarah Bessey (00:00)
Why I can't stay angry even though I want to. Sometimes I get angry. I get angry when a young woman describes what it felt like to watch men stand up and leave the sanctuary when she approached the podium to give her first sermon. I get angry when evangelical leaders show more concern for protecting the powerful at sovereign grace ministries than protecting vulnerable children. I get angry when my most reasoned arguments are dismissed as emotional.

and shrill or when people question my commitment to my faith because I accept evolution or support women in ministry. I get angry when a young gay man cries into my shoulder as he recounts being turned away from his church. I get angry when I overhear people at a restaurant talking about how they hope the verdict in the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman case will quote teach these people some respect. Yes, this happened.

I get angry when like Paul, what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. And it's not just noble stuff either. You should see me when we lose our internet connection. I don't think anger is inherently wrong. Anger is part of what it means to be human, to be empathetic, to be engaged, to recognize sin for what it is, to be tenderhearted and vulnerable, to be awake in this world.

Alexis Rice (01:29)
Welcome to the Sacred Slope, where the slippery slope meets sacred ground. I'm Alexis Rice, and this is a space for people who are interested in looking at different types of lenses of our Christian faith all around the world. We talk to queer pastors, straight pastors. We talk to women. We talk to men. people from all colors, all experiences, different backgrounds, people that typically don't have the microphone in American Christianity today.

is a place for people who are deconstructing. This is a place for people who are curious to learn more about biblical This is a place for your doubts, for your questions, for your grief, for your faith that God is the God you always believed that God was, the loving God, the expansive God who might just have room for all of us.

We are a global community now in over 50 countries. I interview pastors, priests, artists, politicians, sometimes regular people who share their stories about living their faith as best they can in the world. Today is so special because Braving the Truth, by Rachel Held Evans releases everywhere.

It's edited by Sarah Bessey, our guest today. Rachel reshaped my faith. She showed so many of us that honesty isn't the enemy of belief. It's the path to braver love. So instead of just talking about this book, we're gonna read it. We're gonna let Rachel speak. And we're gonna honor her by listening in this

Alexis Rice (03:03)
is page Life After Evangelicalism. Rachel originally posted this on November 14th, 2016.

This is for everyone who stayed home from church yesterday, for every mom of a disabled kid, every survivor of sexual assault, every black or brown body in a predominantly white community, every son or daughter of an immigrant, every defender of the marginalized who just couldn't bring yourself to stand and sing great is thy faithfulness alongside the people you feel sold you out this week, the Christians who supported Donald Trump in this election. Please hear me.

You are not alone. You are not alone in your grief. You are not alone in your anger. You are not alone in your doubt, frustration, and fear. The community that introduced you to Jesus, that baptized you and named you a beloved child of God, has aligned itself with values you don't recognize, powers that oppress. It's an enormous blow, and it'll knock the wind right out of you.

may seem like a petty wound to nurse right now, with Latino children getting taunted by their classmates, Muslim communities facing and Black families grappling with a world in which white nationalism has been validated and emboldened. But grief is grief, and your grief is real and justified. the stark reality is that most white Christians

including more than 80 % of white evangelical Christians, supported Donald Trump for president despite his evident immorality, bigotry, and disregard for the dignity of women, not to mention complete lack of qualifications or competency. We're about to witness firsthand what happens when the established church compromises its moral authority for the promise of power, and it won't be pretty. I predict millennials in particular

will continue to drop out of religious life and the ethnic divides within American Christianity, many sought to heal with a quick fix approach to racial reconciliation that bypassed repentance and justice will only widen. There's an op-ed out every minute urging the bewildered to get out of their bubbles and to get to know some Trump supporters, but you don't need to do that, do you?

These are the people you worship with each week. The people whose kids hang out with your kids, the people who brought you a chicken casserole when you had surgery, the people you call with good news, the people you're now wishing you'd spoken with more bluntly, more honestly. They aren't strangers to you, are they? But suddenly you are a stranger among them and that's a lonely place to be. I know because I've been there. I've stood in a sanctuary singing songs.

I didn't feel like singing, pretending to agree with a political ideology I no longer agreed with, praying to a God I wasn't sure I believed in anymore. It whittles down your spirit a little at a time until one day you realize it's not you going to church anymore but some ghost of you, some cardboard cutout. You send out to maintain the status quo to keep up appearances. The sense of isolation is profound, palpable. You have some decisions up ahead.

the most pressing of which is to stay or to go. I'm not going to tell you what to do about that. When writing about her troubled marriage, author Glennon Doyle wisely avoids telling other women what to do and instead puts the choice this way. Does a love warrior go? Yes. If that's what her deepest wisdom tells her to do. Does a love warrior stay? Yes. If that's what her deepest wisdom tells her to do. Both roads are hard.

and both roads can lead to redemption. The same is true for the church. There is no single road to redemption and there is certainly not a straight one. As novelist Marilyn Robinson has said, grace is not so poor thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways. Perhaps you will stay and work for reform. Perhaps you will leave to join a new community, another tradition. Perhaps you won't know for a while.

But I think we both know something has to change. I eventually left evangelicalism when it became clear that the fight was wearing me down with little promise of change, especially as it... I eventually left evangelicalism when it became clear that the fight was wearing me down with little promise of change, especially as it concerned my LGBTQ plus friends and neighbors. After a few years of wilderness wandering, you should expect that, by the way,

Look for manna, look for water from the rock, I found myself in the Episcopal Church, which is no less riddled with conflict and shortcomings than any other Christian tradition, but which introduced me to the sacraments that have managed to sustain my ever complicated, ever faltering faith. I'm telling you this because I want you to know there is life after evangelicalism.

Perhaps you've been told for as long as you can remember that the rest of the world is dark and evil, that progressive Christianity is full of faithless, lukewarm liberals, but that's not true. Not by a long shot. You see those churches on TV getting defaced by swastikas and racial slurs. Why do you think they've been targeted?

because those churches are inclusive and diverse, because the love inside is so magnetic, so real, so threatening to powers and principalities, even the devil knows it. The church universal is so much bigger than white American evangelicalism, and that's going to become ever more apparent in the months and years to come. The good news is that Jesus is already on the margins. Jesus is already present among the very people and places

our president-elect despises as weak. When we stand in solidarity with the despised and the suffering, Jesus stands with us. We don't have to abandon Jesus to abandon the unholy marriage between Donald Trump and the white American church. In these troubled times, a prophetic resistance will certainly emerge made up of clergy, activists, artists, humorists, liturgists, parents, teachers, and volunteers committing to partnering with and defending the least of these.

I found my faith again in the margins through the gay Christian network, for example, and among fellow doubters and dreamers who limp from their wrestling with God, and I'll be amplifying and supporting these efforts even more as they face potential new threats under this administration, and I hope you will join us. But you should know that as you take those first shaky steps towards something new, grief will stalk along, catching you by surprise.

Losing your first faith is like losing a dear family member or friend, and as with any other death, you sense its absence most profoundly in those everyday moments when it used to be present in a beloved hymn, in a bible verse or prayer, in a strained relationship that used to be so easy. Certainly many are suffering right now, and your crisis of faith may pale in comparison. There are a lot of things I want to write about and advocate for now.

But I wanted to say this first, you are not alone. There is life after this. There is faith after this. Hold on.

Alexis Rice (11:24)
Welcome back to the Sacred Slope, friends. Sarah Bessey, welcome. I'm so honored to have you here.

Sarah Bessey (11:30)
I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Alexis Rice (11:33)
are going to talk about Rachel Held-Evans new book that's out today, Braving the Truth. Before we dive into the book, I wanna start with a story about how Rachel changed my life and why this conversation feels especially important right now. So there was a moment in my life many years ago when I felt fairly liberated, a Jesus loving, ambitious woman reading about another fairly liberated Jesus loving, ambitious woman.

sitting on her roof with her head covered, calling her husband master, and she was doing this all on purpose. And I had just read a year of biblical womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. And though I was already in deconstruction for a long time, Rachel helped give me language and care for our beautiful, diverse, inclusive faith.

Sarah Bessey (12:03)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Alexis Rice (12:28)
And here's what I love about Rachel. She didn't mock scripture and she didn't abandon it. She literally lived it in order to expose how selectively and culturally we often interpret it. And in doing so, she gave so many of us permission to be honest, honest about our questions, honest about power, honest about the difference between Jesus and the systems built in his name.

So Sarah, I would love to ask you, was there a time when you felt God was speaking to you through Rachel?

Sarah Bessey (13:02)
Oh, I mean, pretty constantly. I love that story. I remember those days. Those were fun days. Rachel always had a I don't know, just a real delight in like a kind of a snarky sense of humor. So that makes me laugh that that's where you first intersected was in that story. But there, I think that's one of the things that is kind of a universal experience of encountering Rachel's work is realizing like, oh, maybe this is what.

Alexis Rice (13:09)
You ⁓

Sarah Bessey (13:31)
God's voice can sound like. It can sound like this. I can hear foundational things that she hoped and believed about God and can receive them in a way that maybe I wasn't able to from other places. And so, you know, my story with Rachel goes back a really long time. And some of the very first times when I remember having this moment of feeling like, I think God really has something here for me in Rachel were,

I mean, honestly, even before evolving in monkey town came out her first book ⁓ of just having someone name and articulate the experiences I had had in deconstruction, which was a word that I didn't have access to at the being like, actually, God can meet you in your doubt. God can meet you in your questions. There's nothing that glorifies God about sticking your head in the sand and pretending to be fine.

And even that felt super revolutionary at the time. So yeah, I'm glad that you had an experience that was similar.

Alexis Rice (14:30)
That's so wonderful. I love that. And I love that there's the snarky sense of humor. I love when the snark comes through in her work as well. We all need humor.

Sarah Bessey (14:36)
Hahaha!

Alexis Rice (14:41)
One thing about this book is that the Christian century calls Rachel the C.S. Lewis of her time. And I couldn't agree more because for many of us, she became a guide.

as you have through the wilderness of doubt and deconstruction. A lot of us know that Rachel passed away unexpectedly in 2019, and her final Lenten reflection ended with the words, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. But because she understood something about faith, that is always passing through ashes.

always surrendering certainty, always learning how to trust resurrection when everything feels disoriented. Her sister says in this book that it wasn't uncommon for people to refer to Rachel as a prophet. And maybe a prophet is simply someone who tells the truth before we're ready to hear it. I'm just wondering what you think about that.

Sarah Bessey (15:43)
think it's accurate. I also know that whenever people use language like that about Rachel, she always kind of rolled her eyes a little bit. She was kind of like, she was never someone who believed her own hype too I think when people talk about Rachel being prophetic, maybe it's one part that they felt that it was quite prescient that she was always someone who understood the times really soon.

Alexis Rice (15:51)
Yeah.

Sarah Bessey (16:08)
and was able to speak to them. And in a lot of ways, I don't think even at the time we were aware of how prophetic in that sense she was and could be. Like the amount of times when you're reading things that are 10, 12 years old and you're like, that's happened. That's reality. That's a thing she named before it happened. So that definitely is part of it. But I think that usually when people were saying that, and the thing that I think that it means is that it's maybe more in a biblical sense.

right, that she's someone who told the truth, that she spoke the truth to power, that she said out loud and kind of named these experiences that a lot of us shared, but very few of us, particularly at the time, were able to articulate or even felt heard when we tried to name it. And so, you know, having that sort of boldness, that sort of wisdom, even a fearlessness that feels very prophetic, ⁓ it means that you

that she feels very deeply rooted in what she really hoped. And I think that that's maybe what is kind of meant by that idea of her being a prophet, right? So I don't think you're wrong when you say it's someone who's telling the truth before we're even ready to hear it.

Alexis Rice (17:22)
Yeah. And I can also understand. imagine just felt like a very normal person around it was a little much. Is that right? Right. Right. of that profit part that you just spoke this book and then looking at the timestamps of when she wrote really is wild in this book. So, you know, years

Sarah Bessey (17:30)
Definitely. There was R-H-E and then there was Rage.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (17:47)
on now as Christian nationalism is growing louder, as many of us feel so disoriented and as we try to make sense of good and evil when the categories feel so scrambled right now, as we watch people who raised us in faith advocate for things that really feel nothing like Jesus. To me, Rachel's voice feels less like nostalgic and it feels more necessary.

right now. And I think that's what we're going to be exploring today in this book. before we dive into the book, for those listening, I can't imagine a better person to have this conversation with than you, Sarah Bessey. So for those who don't know, Sarah is a New York Times bestselling author, theologian, co-founder of Evolving Faith. Her works include Jesus Feminist, Out of Sorts, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, and A Rhythm of Prayer.

Sarah Bessey (18:13)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (18:39)
my favorite. These works have helped millions of people around the world hold on to Jesus while releasing fear, rigidity, and harm. thank you so much for being here and for stewarding Rachel's voice in this moment.

Sarah Bessey (18:52)
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation and for all of your kindness.

Alexis Rice (18:56)
let's go ahead talk about how you first met Rachel. I'd love to hear about kind of how you guys first met and how it just clicked, you know, the did that come about? And then I'd love to hear about how Braving the Truth came about.

Sarah Bessey (19:09)
Well, I think like most great love stories these days, we met on the internet, you know. As someone who's been married for 25 years and didn't do any of that life, that's the only claim to a love affair on the internet that I get to I started blogging in 2004 when the medium was really young and Rachel started blogging in 07.

Alexis Rice (19:15)
Excellent. It's the best place to meet people these days.

Sarah Bessey (19:33)
And our paths kind of crossed right around, I think 2009, might be a year earlier. But at the time, I I blogged in pretty much, you know, obscurity for five or six years there. then Rachel kind of came across a post that I had written that was conference at the time for the absence of women in the speaking lineup. And it kind of caused a little bit of a minor

dust up at the time and Rachel reached I realized later that that was a very common experience for a lot of people who were friends with Rachel. just she noticed, you know, she was listening to other voices. She was paying attention to what people were writing. She was always kind of in the wings there. And so she reached out. We clicked immediately and started a friendship that lasted the entire rest of her life and beyond. And so we were writing books in similar lanes and

blogging together for all those years, we started evolving faith together. all of these things were all things we kind of journeyed through together. when it came to how the book came together, so Rachel died in 2019 and it was so incredibly sudden and traumatic. And she was in the midst of working on

several books at the time. mean, Rachel was incredibly prolific and so Jeff Chu, who was a good friend of ours, finished Wholehearted Faith that she had kind of sketched out. She had written quite a bit of it and he just completed the work with her and for were a couple of children's books that Matthew Palturner worked on. And so all of that was work that her husband, her widower, Dan, kind of undertook. And one of the things that kind of emerged was just this real longing for

a collection of Rachel's online She kind of had all these different areas where she was active and online was a huge aspect of her life and her influence and her presence in people's lives. When I talk to people even now about how her work intersected with their lives, they are just as likely to talk about particular blog posts or even tweets.

as they are about a book or a talk or a podcast or something else that maybe happened along the way. so Dan reached out to me a few years ago and just said, would you be willing? And of course I was. I was there in real time for pretty much the entirety of all of it. It's a lot of shared past there. And so then I took the last two years to just kind of really immerse myself in Rachel's online work and to really kind of discern what to include.

whatnot to, contextualize and, you know, gather it up. And then I think the thing that was carrying me in the midst of all of it was exactly what you said in your intro of it wasn't nostalgic for me. It wasn't a keepsake, you know, for people who were there in real time. I know the internet has changed and her blog is, you know, likely to kind of, you know, be lost at times to future generations. And so this is a way of saying, you know what, this is a gift from the past.

for the future of the church. Like it is incredibly necessary. And if you need to understand what's going on in the church right now, if you need to understand kind of this moment, Rachel's a really, really good place to start, particularly as a voice of her generation,

Alexis Rice (22:33)
⁓ Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. We are going to be diving into a few passages, but I just wanted to highlight some of the ones meant a lot to me. There's too many to name, but there was one that I read and put out on a clip on social media called, They Were Right and Wrong About the Slippery Slope. Why I can't stay angry even though I want to.

changing faith and changing relationships, some things I learned the hard way. For the sake of the gospel, let women speak. For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex. We could spend a whole hour on that one, right, Sarah? Life after evangelicalism, which is so beautiful because it was not all about leaving Christianity, leaving Jesus, right? That's what's so for people to understand.

Sarah Bessey (23:08)
Hmm.

Right? So true.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (23:31)
15 reasons I left the church, 15 reasons I returned to the church, five things you don't have to leave behind when you leave my son or daughter were gay, the Bible was quote clear. And this one's hilarious. I told my husband this literally a few weeks ago. I was like,

Sarah Bessey (23:36)
Hahaha.

Alexis Rice (23:50)
Look, look, look, this is what I said. It said, everyone's a biblical literalist until you bring up gluttony. And I was like, yes, why don't we talk about gluttony and materialism and power and all that? was like, we talk about these other quote sins and not. So anyway, those are some of the ones mean so much and more. this book will be something for the ages.

Sarah Bessey (23:55)
Yeah, that's a good one.

Yep.

Alexis Rice (24:15)
really a timeless book. know that this is a hard day. This is a beautiful day because it's the release. a lot of people have reached out to me and they've already said like, you know, I was crying when she died on the day she died, right? The impact of her work.

but you were one of her best friends. What was it like emotionally to edit her work? And do you have any words for people who are lamenting right now?

Sarah Bessey (24:38)
Yeah.

It was harder than I could have imagined it would be. And I had a pretty good idea that it was going to be pretty hard and a bit of a heavy lift. But it was also a lot more beautiful and healing than I could have hoped. I hadn't revisited a lot of this in the years since losing Rachel, just it felt too painful. And so...

stepping back into these moments in our into the evolution that she dared to do in public for people come alongside of think I even said this in the introduction, like it felt like time travel sometimes. Like I would almost emerge from it and it just could hardly believe that so many years had passed and so much had changed and that she wasn't here to laugh over some of these things together.

But even when it felt really impossible and when it felt like there's a lot of days where there were a lot of tears, I found a lot of hope in Rachel's work did what it always does for all of us. And I think that's a big reason why people had that feeling of grief and lament that far of just, this is a I follow online, right? That she offered a lot of hope. so

even all these years later, I found that in the work still, found her voice. It took about five or six years to be able to talk about her without crying a lot. And some of this may just be dissociation and compartmentalization, so I will make room for that as well.

in some ways, it gave back the totality of Rachel, right? Even the moments when she was wrong and she'd admit it, or she would with people and community that was there. And so I think when people grieved that way over her loss, whether it was watching the funeral service online remembrances that happened when that all unfolded, in a lot of ways, they did know her.

You know, Rachel was very much the same person on the page or on the screen that she was in real life. And in a lot of ways, she definitely swore more in real life than she did online. And she could be really snarky. And we loved that about her. She was funny, right? And so I think that that's ultimately even some of the essays that I wanted to include in the book that became really clear early on was like, it'd be low hanging fruit and easy to just say,

Well, here's all the ones that got all the clicks, go with God. Here's the ones that made the gospel coalition really angry for a long time. Let's do these those are there, right? Those are all there. Those are all important parts of the turning of the story. But there were also a lot of moments that show why people trusted Rachel and why they felt so alongside of her, why she felt like such a good friend to them. And so you see those essays in there as well, whether there's one that I'm thinking of

that she wrote that I still to this day think is incredibly vulnerable and brave and unprecedented honestly in Christian leadership and ministry these days, probably even more so now than it was then. It was called, I Don't Always Tell You. And it's when she's like, I don't always tell you that I don't believe this all the don't always tell you that I'm sometimes really bored by Christian books.

There was a level of honesty to what she was writing in that post, but then the thing that really makes it different than most, she doesn't tie it up with a bow. She doesn't say, and here's three things I do when I feel discouraged. know, like she just lets it sit there and makes room for you to come alongside of her and say, yeah, me too. Me too. I feel that too. Right. Instead of rushing to fix it or rushing to over-spiritualize it or rushing to

Alexis Rice (27:49)
right.

Hmm.

Sarah Bessey (28:05)
solved the equation of your own heart's longing. And so that's a big reason why people trusted her. She really did tell the truth.

Alexis Rice (28:17)
Can we go ahead and read the Why I Can't Stay Angry? Would you mind to read on page

reason I picked this is feel like a lot of us really need to know what to do right now with this anger because of what's going on in our world, especially in the United States.

Sarah Bessey (28:29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (28:35)
It just feels so hard not to stay angry. And I actually do think it's helpful to talk about what does this

Sarah Bessey (28:42)
for sure.

I can't stay angry even though I want to. Sometimes I get angry. I get angry when a young woman describes what it felt like to watch men stand up and leave the sanctuary when she approached the podium to give her first sermon. I get angry when evangelical leaders show more concern for protecting the powerful at sovereign grace ministries than protecting vulnerable children. I get angry when my most reasoned arguments are dismissed as emotional.

and shrill or when people question my commitment to my faith because I accept evolution or support women in ministry. I get angry when a young gay man cries into my shoulder as he recounts being turned away from his church. I get angry when I overhear people at a restaurant talking about how they hope the verdict in the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman case will quote teach these people some respect. Yes, this happened.

I get angry when like Paul, what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. And it's not just noble stuff either. You should see me when we lose our internet connection. I don't think anger is inherently wrong. Anger is part of what it means to be human, to be empathetic, to be engaged, to recognize sin for what it is, to be tenderhearted and vulnerable, to be awake in this world.

Throughout scripture, we encounter a God who is angered by injustice and the neglect of the poor. Jesus expressed anger at those who exploited the poor and vulnerable, who harmed children and who shut the door to the kingdom and people's faces through religious legalism and exclusion. As NT Wright has said, to deny God's wrath is at bottom to deny God's love.

When God sees human beings enslaved, if God doesn't hate it, he is not a loving God. We are right to be angered by inequity and injustice, whether inflicted upon ourselves or on other people. And we have to be very careful about telling other people, particularly those in the process of healing, when they ought to be angry, when they ought to forgive, or when they ought to quote, move on. But if Jesus is our example, if being fully human,

and fully God looks like this carpenter from Nazareth. We know that the evil within ourselves and in this world cannot be conquered by hate, but must be overcome with love. You have heard it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, Jesus says in a particularly annoying part of the Sermon on the Mount. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your father in heaven.

I struggle with this, like big time.

Alexis Rice (31:32)
Sarah, what does this bring up for you in the context of today?

Sarah Bessey (31:35)
think there is something that Rachel did in this ⁓ that is maybe a subtext to it. And that is that she blesses our anger. Right. And that's something that I think particularly for women raised in the evangelical church, I think she would point to her experience ⁓ as a southern woman raised in the evangelical tradition. ⁓ There's not a lot of room for women's anger. And so even having this

flat blessing and even sacramentalizing of your anger ⁓ is really beautiful. Instead of pathologizing it or turning it into an enemy or it's just this is a path towards love. You're angry because you love deeply and because you care deeply. And she goes on in it to talk a lot more about how this actually can be manifest in our lives and how to steward your anger well. But that's an aspect that I remember

feeling like was quite electrifying because for a generation of women that had been taught that anger is a sin, it was an incredible thing to be told your anger is actually a sacred tool.

Alexis Rice (32:42)
Next, we're going to go into women and scripture and power. I think this is so important because I feel like for some reason, evangelical women, were taught exactly what you said. There also seems to be a

wave of

The attempt by certain men to put women back down in our place. Sexual exploitation, abuse, not standing up for survivors. In this country trying someone like Doug Wilson, who would be fine with repealing the 19th Amendment for women to vote. There's just all sorts of stuff that feels scary

Sarah Bessey (33:03)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (33:20)
especially when it's being taught to our younger Christian men as like this is biblical. That's the part that I want to speak out on and what Rachel did such good work on is what does it mean to be a faithful woman of Jesus, why did Rachel's work on women and scripture feel threatening in your opinion?

Sarah Bessey (33:41)
definitely did. I mean, I think that for some reason there was something about Rachel and her work. Well, I felt like I have a pretty good idea of what that thing was that really deeply upset and angered these forces of patriarchy that exists within the church as well as outside of the church. during those years, Rachel and I were part of like a pretty wide collective of voices online.

You know, like there was a whole community of women and men and, you know, non-binary folks who were writing and talking and speaking into this. ⁓ And all of us were standing kind of on these shoulders of the second wave feminist movement within the church. ⁓ And so those same feminists, were, you know, our elders, right? They were, you know, just a little bit ahead of us on the path. And there were a number of times when I remember

them telling me and Rachel and others of us that they were so deeply grieved over the necessity of our work, that they felt that they had made such strides in the 70s. Like I remember one even telling me like we thought genuinely we were fixing this for your generation, like that this would not even be an issue anymore because that's how hopeful and how much of a difference we made in a very short amount of time.

But then came the backlash of the moral majority, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, all those sorts of things in the 80s. It's all very politically motivated. And so Rachel's work for women in the church, for women in ministry, it felt threatening because it was threatening. It was threatening. It was threatening to the powers and principalities, which I come from a charismatic background, so I like big, juicy language like that. ⁓

these powers and principalities of patriarchy, right? Because she was making a difference. They would not have been so angry and so vicious and so cruel if they hadn't been so desperate to silence and control her. And in reclaiming her voice, I think she ended up empowering a generation of women in the church to also speak up. I have lost count of how many women I have talked to who tell me that

encountering her work was like their first step or a step along a journey that led to ministry and to seminary, to teaching, to activism, to preaching, like to all sorts of justice work and peacemaking work and like leadership and empowerment. And so that all feels like a huge part of her legacy as well. And so when I look back on that season now, more than a decade later, I think we are in another backlash season, right?

⁓ I think that the seeds were always there. ⁓ But after 2016, what was in the shadows became mainstream. I often say that the last 10 years in particular have felt apocalyptic, ⁓ not in a, you know, make fundamentalist preachers nervous sort of way, although they should be, ⁓ but more in the sense of like, there's been a revealing, like everything that was hidden politely and not talked about tucked away in the corners is now front and center.

Alexis Rice (36:39)
Yes.

Sarah Bessey (36:44)
mainstream news, it is driving policy, it is ruining lives, it is tearing apart families. And so we're seeing that same spirit now trying to grab ahold of our daughters and our children and our churches and all of that, right? And so it's all connected. And I think it's like a lot of our elders that we had telling us about how they've experienced that backlash in the eighties. I think we're experiencing a very similar resistance and campaign now that is very politically rooted and politically motivated, right? But I think that what's

Alexis Rice (37:11)
Yeah.

Sarah Bessey (37:13)
Also, maybe a part of that that does give me a lot of hope, there's a lot of things that give me hope in the midst of all of it, but more and more women are speaking up, a lot of us who are also under the boot of what Rachel used to call, people loved this, she used to call it the unholy American trinity of religious nationalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Like that all those things are so deeply intersectional and connected,

a big reason why people found her very threatening. I think it also speaks to the moment that we are in right now and why the work that Rachel has already done is so necessary and needed, ⁓ the labor of it, right? Like, one of the things that made me sad in the book was that I couldn't include like these deep dive, very nerdy, heavy chapter length essays that she would do these deep dives into like,

Alexis Rice (37:50)
Yeah, yes.

Sarah Bessey (38:03)
gender roles and Roman household codes and the Greek. she just had such respect for her leaders and just would like, here's this delusion of research and tools and language for this thing that people are using to try to silence you or push you to the corner. And so the nice thing is all that is still available online. And I did pick a few representative ones and tuck them in there just so I could have a chance to point people back and be like, don't forget that she did all this labor for you already.

Alexis Rice (38:10)
I love it.

Yes, I love that so

love seeing more women speak out. What I also really appreciate are how many men online, Christian men, Christian pastors are speaking out. Joe Smith, for example, uses his voice all the time stand up. He's a strong guy pastor and speaking up on behalf of women in the church and saying, respect women as leaders, as pastors. And the voices that we can have. That's what allyship is all about. Yeah. OK.

Sarah Bessey (38:38)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Alexis Rice (38:58)
a lot of us were raised at face value the dreaded Timothy ⁓ might not have even

by the Apostle Paul. McClellan does a really great synopsis about this, about how people were writing under the name. And that's possibly why, Timothy and some of these epistles don't match some of the other ones where Paul was actually very much in favor in elevating women as apostles. So that first Timothy,

talks about a woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man. She must be quiet. So, you know, of course the Bible is clear, right, Sarah?

Sarah Bessey (39:34)
think there's an essay about that in there.

Alexis Rice (39:37)
It

is. It's such a good one. But wanted to put this out there because for those of us who really are church people who really do want to seek the word of God and understand this differently, I think this was really important to understand that that is not the open and shut case about women in I'll read a little bit of page 76. It says, obviously, Paul didn't have a problem.

Sarah Bessey (39:54)
Yeah.

Alexis Rice (40:00)
With women teaching in general, he honored Priscilla, a teacher to the apostle Apollos, and praised Timothy's mother and grandmother for teaching Timothy all he knew about faith. He recognized Junia as an apostle, Phoebe as a deacon, and Judea and Syntyche as church planters. In fact, these days, women in the pulpit are more highly educated than their male counterparts, while over three quarters of pastors, 77 % hold seminary degrees.

Less than two thirds of male pastors, 63 % can say the same. It continues to amaze me that some evangelicals believe that Fred Phelps of Westboro Church, who was ordained at 17 without a seminary degree, is more qualified by virtue of being a man who spoke to the church than someone like my Rose, received top honors at her seminary.

and is now a pastor at Irving Bible Church in Dallas, or Catherine Hamlin, who devoted her life to caring for fistula patients in Africa, or Sarah Coakley, who is one of Christianity's most influential theologians and philosophers currently working on a four-volume systematic theology. Something needs to change.

Sarah Bessey (41:09)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alexis Rice (41:11)
What

do you think the message would be for where we're at in terms of how we can get more change to happen that women are more respected in church spaces and in general?

Sarah Bessey (41:21)
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of content that Rachel created and equipped even and resources that she offered to people. the thing that I would hope that young women or older women or anyone who's encountering Rachel's work for the first time maybe would hear there is ultimately permission, right? That you have permission to question the things that you've always been taught.

all the reasons why you were given to be silent or be stuffed in a corner or to not even acknowledge the gifts and callings that you had. Like I remember one story Rachel used to tell was how she was in like a preaching class and she preached a sermon and someone had said something, you know, you'd be a great pastor if you weren't a girl, right? And so these kinds of like just small moments that kind of happen along the way, having someone like Rachel,

Alexis Rice (42:01)
I believe it. Yep.

Sarah Bessey (42:07)
I hope that having that kind of big sister's voice in their ear telling you just to go for it, you have all the permission that you need and that you've already been given, And so I think that that's maybe part of it, part of what I think the legacy and the hopefulness would be on the other side of that. Because ultimately, no matter what sort of backlash we are in, and we are in one,

things that haven't changed are God's love and grace gospel, right? It hasn't changed that you aren't alone in the midst of it. It hasn't changed that God has called you to lead. You know, it hasn't changed that you need each other and we do need each other, right? We're never as alone as we feel sometimes. then what doesn't change in the midst of all of that as well are things like the courage and the faithfulness and the boldness that is required to truly live a life that is centered on what you

know and believe and maybe even just truest about God's love place in this world. And so I think that dream for humanity is a big thing that helps. It's the

can grow you can use as you begin to

Alexis Rice (43:13)
I dear friend of has followed your work for is grieved about what's happening in the United States right now as a Christian. She wanted to know, and I want to know, what is it like being a Canadian right now? what is it, do you feel like when you witness what's happening in the United States?

Sarah Bessey (43:26)
Ha

Alexis Rice (43:33)
as a Canadian, do you feel relief that you're not here? Do you feel distance? Do you feel powerlessness? Do you feel solidarity? how is that different than being a Christian in America maybe? Like outside of explicitly MAGA spaces, what does it look like?

Sarah Bessey (43:47)
I mean, I definitely the differences feel a lot more stark, The divide it's very much there. So it can definitely be like a bit of a mix, right? It depends on the day. know, on those days when we as Canadians are being targeted or attacked, whether it's like economically or, even attacks against our sovereignty, which I take very seriously. I think most of us do.

There can be, I think, a very similar anger and a sense stable floor that you walked on is gone now. And so that kind the bullying pettiness of it, it has a lot of consequences. And so the impact the current administration worldwide is massive right now.

I mean, Canadians are definitely feeling it. know Americans, of course, are feeling it very heavily and very closely. a lot of us feel a tremendous amount of compassion, especially for the believers that we know are standing in resistance to a lot of what's happening. I think the effect impacts, you know, Gaza, Greenland, Ukraine, right? Like you just, can name any spot on the world and we are all feeling the effects of what the current American administration is doing. Like the world order is just being remade.

you know, our prime minister, Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos about this a few weeks ago, that we are all having to kind of reset and rebuild in the aftermath of America. And even he talked with a lot of pragmatism that to me feels like it has a lot of connections to like the peacemaking that's required of us right now. I think overall, like when I think about America, there's the America that is doing this their people.

to their communities, to their neighbors, to the world, right? To all of us as neighbors and allies. But then there's my friends and there's my neighbors and there's the people that I've worked alongside of and labored alongside of for decades. And so then I feel just a very deep sense of like grief and solidarity. But then that also is what gives me a lot of hope because it's really good for Canadians and I think for the world period to keep remembering that like America is not this administration.

It's part of it, you know, for sure. There's a reality that is at work here and you can't deny or diminish that. But there's also a lot of folks like yourself who are engaged in faithful resistance, in doing everything that they can to fight for their neighbors and for their values. And helps give me a lot of hope for you all. I place a lot of hope in the...

Alexis Rice (45:50)
Amen.

Sarah Bessey (46:11)
stubbornness of the American people, if that makes sense, right? And just like that defiant hopefulness that still remains there. And even when things are awful, like just the amount of messages that I receive from people who are just like, not all of us, we're all still here, we're all still here, we're not done yet. It does give me a lot of hope for sure. But I think like a lot of the world, there's both the empathy,

Alexis Rice (46:15)
Yes.

Sarah Bessey (46:35)
and the grief and the solidarity, and then there's the lived reality that we all live with the impact of what this means in our lives.

Alexis Rice (46:42)
Yeah. very we will work through this together as one

Sarah Bessey (46:47)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (46:48)
And we will make a more beautiful world out of this. I really believe that.

Sarah Bessey (46:50)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (46:56)
I have a lot of empathy for people who have left church spaces, especially in the last Millions of people have left church spaces. And something I talk about on this podcast a lot is sometimes that was the faithful move. Sometimes that was. of us who are raised in fundamentalism were told that was the wrong thing to do.

Sarah Bessey (47:10)
Yeah,

Alexis Rice (47:17)
that was the bad thing to do. That was the unchristian thing to some people feel that they have no other connection to God, like if they've been kicked out of church spaces, for example, because that's what fundamentalism told us, it has to be that way or no faith. And this is

Sarah Bessey (47:20)
Right.

Yeah.

Alexis Rice (47:34)
some of the beauty of the work that I wanted to talk about with you and about Rachel's work is that there's all this in between no connection with the divine. maybe we can talk about that after we read about fundamentalism.

Sarah Bessey (47:48)
things you don't have to leave behind when you leave fundamentalism, although sometimes you have to rediscover them. First, love for the Bible. Fundamentalists often treat the Bible as a set of propositional statements designed to conform to modern enlightenment influenced expectations. It is flattened out and simplified, used as a weapon against other people and a prop for pet political and theological positions.

And so I see a lot of people leaving their Bibles behind on the bookshelf when they leave fundamentalism. This is understandable, but heartbreaking and unnecessary. Leaving fundamentalism means learning to accept the Bible in its own terms, loving it for what it is, not for what we want it to be. It has been such a joy to rediscover the Bible in a way that respects the cultures and contexts in which it was written and assembled. For example, the creation account of Genesis 1 is arguably more meaningful.

and more profound when we understand it not as a modern science text, but as an ancient Near Eastern temple text that honors Elohim as ruler over creation. Similarly, it will not do to simply shrug off as irrelevant those sections of the epistles that seem to relegate women to certain roles.

we have to get a better sense of their context and purpose, which in my experience has them to be radically progressive, Christ-centered, meaning quite the opposite of what they are often said to mean. Of course, there are still those texts that trouble me profoundly, the genocidal conquests of Canaan, for example. But I've come to believe that wrestling with the Bible is better than ignoring it. To those willing to keep digging, the Bible will not disappoint.

And in that essay, she goes on to do the same thing with the church, with discipline, with friendships, and with holiness.

Alexis Rice (49:41)
I love at the end when she says, but leaving fundamentalism doesn't mean leaving behind your self-respect or your commitment to imitating Christ. It means pursuing holiness out of love, not fear or guilt.

Sarah Bessey (49:54)
I think that was one of the things that sometimes really infuriated Rachel's critics, like they almost would have liked it more if she would have been like, that's it, I'm out of here. The Bible's garbage, church is awful. There's nothing to redeem here. But she was insistent on loving these things and staying present. You know, even when she stepped away

stepped away from evangelicalism and from self-identifying as an evangelical, which actually even have a chance to kind of see that evolution happen in the book. And we include those like pivotal moments in her journey that she was living in real time, like in public in front of everybody. You know, she always maintained that larger connection to these things, whether it was church, the Bible. Even she was like frustratingly convinced that like holiness mattered, you know, and faithfulness.

Like, in a lot of ways, she could have probably made life a little bit easier for herself if she wasn't so committed to being like, I think the fruit of the spirit matters, guys, you know? And so even acknowledging, though, that she was bringing a lot of evangelicalism with her very joyfully into her new evolutions, right? That she loved the sacraments and she loved the scriptures. Like, I can't remember anybody else in my life who has loved the Bible the way that Rachel loved the Bible.

the way she loved her little church plant that of the friends that embodied the hope for the church. And she loved everybody who was a part of the church even now and kind of refused to paint this broad brush of like making everyone with whom she disagreed into an enemy. I think that she saw there was something really beautiful there. And ultimately, I think what came through there a thing that ended up really informing how we formed Evolving Faith.

as a conference and as a community was we were very aware that it was necessary to name what we were against. know, goes back to what we were talking about with anger, right? Like having your anger blessed it is deeply important that you can say this is wrong. This is sinful. This is broken. This is bad. This is harmful. Those are deeply important things to be able to name and there's a lot of faithfulness to saying those things out loud.

but stopping there instead of moving into, what is it that I wanna be for? It's not enough just to be against things. And I think that's one of the things that Rachel modeled for us. Sometimes messily was her learning what she wanted to be for, what she wanted to be for in the church or how you interact with scripture or how you treat your neighbor or how you care for refugees and immigrants and.

what it meant for LGBTQ+ believers and non-believers and how these things kind of showed up in our politics and in our life. And so, even to your point, like it might be really faithful to leave, right? And she talks about that even when she's writing about the church there. But there is a lot more room than we were taught, and I think that that means, when you kind of keep following that path of figuring out what you want to be for.

For Rachel, that ended up looking like, I want bigger banquet tables. She was always wanting to keep open to set more places that, both figurative and literal so having that opportunity to say like, we're it, the church includes all of us misfits worth staying for.

Alexis Rice (52:52)
You

Yeah.

Sarah Bessey, As We Close many lives Rachel touched, And there so many contributors in this book Glennon Doyle, Jen Hatmaker, Matthew Paul Turner, Brian McLaren, her family's in here, Pete Enns.

and so many millions of unnamed people. There is something in me that feels like this couldn't have come at a better time. This book, this is important. for the person who might be listening, who feels spiritually homeless right now, who feels exhausted, disillusioned, but not necessarily ready to give up on Jesus. What do think Rachel might say now?

Sarah Bessey (53:20)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (53:45)
and what do you say to them now?

Sarah Bessey (53:47)
There was something that Rachel wrote in searching for Sunday that I've actually kept like just on my desk here, like I've got in front of Because to me, feel these words are something has, you know, going back even to your very first question of like, where were the moments when you felt God speaking to you? Like this was one of them for me. literally from the moment she wrote this, was something that I've, it was what helped form evolving faith.

But I remember her writing and including this, she said, this is what God's kingdom is like. A bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry and because they said yes, and there's always room for more. And so to me, I think that vision for the kingdom of God, the thing to say,

right, to anyone who is feeling that exhaustion and that disillusionment, but yet is trying, like almost sometimes it feels like with white knuckles to hold onto a Jesus that people are trying to tear out of your hands. It's that you already belong in this story and no one gets to take Jesus away from you. No one gets to take everything that you love and hope for and that has brought goodness and flourishing to you and to so many. Nobody gets to take that away from you. And ultimately, I think message that is underneath all of it

constantly the foundation was just Rachel's insistence you are loved and that you belong.

Alexis Rice (55:15)
Sarah Bessie, thank you for being on the sacred slope today and bringing Rachel with you.

Sarah Bessey (55:20)
Thank you so much.

Alexis Rice (55:22)
Thank you for joining us today on The Sacred Slope. If you'd like to nominate a pastor, priest, or clergy member anywhere in the world, send me an email at Alexis @ thesacredslope.com. Music was by Brett Rutledge, Eddie Irvin, and Sean Spence. May the fruit of the spirit guide you this week. I'm Alexis Rice. Go in peace, friends.