What Would Rachel Held Evans Do? Late Author’s Voice Lives in Those She Championed

(RNS) — It’s been a year since beloved progressive Christian author and speaker Rachel Held Evans died unexpectedly — and in that year, a common refrain sounded again and again online among her many readers and friends.

“I wish Rachel was here,” they would say, when her closest friends and collaborators release books she had encouraged.

“I wonder what Rachel would say about this,” they would mourn, as theological and political divides deepen and a pandemic sweeps the globe.

Matthew Vines has had those moments, too.

“Let me count the ways,” Vines said.

The author of “God and the Gay Christian” said he finds himself spending less time on Twitter now that Evans is no longer there.

Evans had a way of shaping the conversation online, he said. She provided a “grounding center in conversations and discourse” for all kinds of people — those on similar journeys from conservative evangelical Christianity to progressive Christianity, those who were beginning to doubt or ask hard questions about their faith, those who had walked away from church years ago or who were made to feel unwelcome there and never looked back.

“She was threading a lot of needles that are very difficult to thread, and in so doing, she was a bridge and a bridge who was able to reach a very broad spectrum of people,” Vines said.

He misses that.

But, he said, Evans put so much of herself…