Berry's "Sabbath Poems" have become part of how I do church Sunday mornings

The Parrinos have made a pretty big transition in the last couple of months: We've moved states after nearly a decade living in Kentucky. We've both changed jobs and two of our boys have had to adjust to a new level of academic rigor. We've gone from small town to bigger city. We've moved from a modest ranch to a lovely home with three floors and many, many places to put people. Perhaps one of the most significant changes, and the one that probably raises the most eyebrows among both our "Kentucky people" and our "Ohio people," is a shift in our church community. 

I found something sacred in Rachel Held Evans' "Searching for Sunday"

I've been looking forward to Rachel Held Evans' new book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church for several months. Her excellent blog has challenged, affirmed and inspired me over the last few years. Books written by bloggers often read like scrapbooks of their greatest hits: A rehash of the post that went viral here, an astute observation from commenter Mary L. from Kansas there. Thankfully, Searching for Sunday is not that.

It is an honest, hopeful meditation on her disorienting drift away from her childhood church into the wilderness of doubt, then back to a renewed search for community and the discovery of Christ's Bride in unexpected places.

While many topics covered in her book have been discussed extensively on her blog, Evans resists recycling popular posts. Instead, the book benefits from her versatility as a blogger. Chapters like "Chubby Bunny" humorously relive Evans' childhood growing up small town Baptist. Chapters like "The Meal" showcase her training as a journalist as she interviews the pastor of an innovative, inner-city "dinner church" in New York. Chapters like "Trembling Giant" meditate on the awesome single organism that is an entire forest of quaking aspens in Fish Lake, Utah, as a metaphor for the universal church.  Still other chapters, like "Dust," stem from Evans' Bible college education, reading like beautiful sermons that explore stories from scripture.