Episode Details

For Sarah Henn Hayward, reading a few too many books, meeting a few too many beautiful non-Christians, and asking a few too many questions, was just too much for her Evangelical faith.

For five years, we’ve been building a community of like-minded people wrestling with a spirituality that didn’t work for us  …. or even harmed us.

We’re all Recovering Evangelicals.

In this episode, we talk to yet another Recovering Evangelical … Sarah Henn Hayward … who just published her deconstruction story in Giving up God: resurrecting a spirituality of love and wonder.

Through her first two decades, Sarah was fully on board with her Evangelical faith, wearing it on her sleeve and actively laboring for it. But she was also a voracious reader, and a critical thinker. Ultimately, we’ll find, she simply asked a few too many questions and read a few too many books, and that led to her leaving that worldview and starting a journey to look for another one.

Going to university to pursue a career in health care immediately began to chip away at her Evangelical beliefs and values. One student she befriended was full of life, joy and goodness: however, he was gay. Another fellow student who seemed to share all of Sarah’s values and deep religious conviction, was a Muslim. Sarah’s relationship with both of them, and others, caused her to question so many ideas that she had grown up accepting fully, and so many parts of the Bible which she thought were absolutely condemning of friends like them. At the same time, Sarah discovered the writings of an Episcopalian Christian mystic — which further challenged many of her Evangelical ideas, especially those pertaining to hell. And then, ironically, the fourth serious challenge to her Evangelical faith was a number of theology courses that she took: learning about how the Bible and Christian dogma were put together by humans was eye-opening, to say the least.

“A world full of blurred lines and shades of grey felt scary compared to the simplistic black-and-white views I’d held before. Now I had a harder time reading the Bible with all this cultural cont