Quote of the Day: Rachel Held Evans on Radical Inclusion

What this quote means

On the surface, Evans is inverting the common assumption that the Gospel is a barrier — a line drawn to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the pure from the contaminated. She argues the opposite: the Gospel is not a gate but an open door, and what truly scandalises people is not who is locked out but who is invited in.

The deeper truth is about the radical hospitality at the heart of Christianity. From the very beginning, Jesus offended his contemporaries by eating with tax collectors and sinners, touching lepers, and welcoming women and outcasts into his inner circle. The Gospel doesn’t say “become worthy and you may enter.” It says “come as you are.” That insistence — that grace precedes behaviour, that belonging precedes believing — is precisely what makes it offensive. It refuses to let anyone stand comfortably on the outside of someone else’s grace.

Evans wrote these words in her final book, Inspired, published in 2018, the year before she died at age 37. She had spent the previous decade navigating the tension between her evangelical upbringing and the progressive convictions she had come to hold — on LGBTQ+ inclusion, on the ordination of women, on the authority of Scripture, on the meaning of church. This quote is distilled from that entire journey: the real Gospel doesn’t exclude; it includes, and the people it includes are the ones who make the comfortable uncomfortable.

Today, the quote challenges us wherever we draw lines between insiders and outsiders. Whether in politics, religion, or everyday community life, the instinct to police boundaries is powerful. Evans reminds us that the Gospel’s edge is not in its rigidity but in its radical openness — in the table it sets, the guests it invites, and the door it leaves unlocked.

About Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans was born on June 8, 1981, in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in a family that was deeply embedded in Southern evangelical culture. Her father was a church deacon; her mother was a teacher; and faith was the centre of their household life. Evans loved the church, and she loved the Bible, and for a long time those two things did not conflict — until they did. The turning point came when she began to question the rigid gender roles, the political alignments, and the narrow definitions of salvation she had absorbed. Rather than abandoning her faith, she interrogated it, publicly and relentlessly, with a combination of humility, humour, and theological seriousness that won her a readership far beyond any single denomination.

Her first book, Faith Unraveled (originally titled Evolving in Monkey Town), traced her evolution from a confident culture warrior to someone who was willing to say “I don’t know.” Her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012), became a New York Times bestseller when she took a year to live out every command about women in the Bible — from modesty and submission to hospitality and childbearing — with satirical sincerity that revealed both the beauty and the absurdity of how the Bible has been weaponised. Her third book, Searching for Sunday (2015), offered a tender memoir of leaving and returning to the church, structured around the sacraments of communion, baptism, confession, and others.

Evans died on May 4, 2019, after a sudden illness, at the age of 37. She left behind two young children, a devoted husband, and a community of readers who saw in her a model of what faith looks like when it is honest. Her legacy continues through her books, her blog, and the countless readers who credit her with helping them find their way back to — or finally away from — a faith that no longer fit. She remains one of the most important Christian voices of her generation, and her work is as relevant now as it was when she was alive.

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