Tributes Pour In For Rachel Held Evans, A Beacon For Progressive Christianity

Tributes are continuing to pour in for Rachel Held Evans , the popular progressive Christian writer who died on Saturday following an infection and brain seizures.

Evans’ fans and friends have gone online to reflect on how her writing and advocacy affected their lives remembering how she encouraged women to preach from the pulpit, spoke up as an ally for LGBTQ Christians, and assured those walking away from conservative evangelicalism that it was normal and healthy to wrestle with doubt.

Queer Christian author Glennon Doyle, who wrote the foreword for Evans’ 2015 book, “Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church,” called Evans a “friend to the hurting, questioning, outcast, the underdog & forgotten.”

“I’ve never seen anyone match her courage & relentless commitment to use her pen, heart & might to fight for the least of these within the religious establishment,” Doyle tweeted on Saturday . “She refused to abandon us.” 

“She was our warrior. We needed her. Without her, I feel scared,” Doyle wrote.

Born on June 8, 1981, Evans grew up in an evangelical family in the Bible belt. She worked as a journalist for Dayton, Tennessee’s local newspaper, the Herald-News, and began blogging about her experiences with Christianity in the early 2000s. Over the years, she wrote several popular books about her journey away from her childhood faith and toward a more progressive Christianity that is committed to feminism, inclusive of the LGBTQ community and accepting of doubt. 

Fellow writers tweeted about how Evans used her platform to amplify marginalized voices and encourage others to pursue their own career goals.

In a statement on Monday, leaders of the Evolving Faith Conference said they still intend to hold the event in October. 

“We don’t know how we will carry on without our Rachel. We cannot even imagine it,” they wrote on the conference’s website. “But we know how much she loved this space, how much she loved all of you, and so we will do our best to do right by her here.”

Jeff Chu, a conference co-host and gay Christian author, wrote on Twitter that he was one of a few friends who gathered at Evans’ bedside to say goodbye. He said he got to hold her hand and “thank her for being who she was.”

“Rachel saw the architecture of so much of the Church for what it was: facades and false walls, built to exclude so many of us. She realized that what seemed like the center wasn’t the center, and what we’d made to be the margins weren’t actually the margins,” Chu wrote . “She recognized the real geometry of God, and used her stories and her words to [break] down what wasn’t/isn’t of God and to construct what was, building up bridges and walkways and all kinds of connecting paths for so many of us to find our way back to God’s love and to one another.”