On the Loss of a Prophet
This past weekend, Christianity lost one of its most faithful prophets and leaders. Rachel Held Evens was a bit older than I am, but not by much, and died after receiving an antibiotic that she unknowingly had an allergy to. She had a husband and two young children, and a massive fanbase of readers that were taken with her approach that refused to fit into any stereotype or mold. Rachel was born into the evangelical/fundamentalist movement and was a bit of a zealot for much of her early adulthood. She eventually became disillusioned with the culture around that movement and became a vocal critic, and eventually became an extremely popular religious author. Even though she parted ways with the fundamentalist movement, she always approached difficult subjects with heaps of compassion and nuance. During her faith crisis, she found her way to an Episcopal Church in Dayton, Tennessee, not far from where I went to high school. Many of the articles I have recently read about her make it sound like it was her newfound Episcopal identity that lead her to be a critic of her former Church, which is entirely inaccurate. She was a critic first, and in her search for authenticity and sense of place she found the Episcopal Church.
