9: How to Talk About Divorce & Grief

This episode is for you if you want to learn how to listen and talk to people who suffer. It can be easy to believe that the Christian life will inoculate us against heartbreak; that’s certainly what purity culture books implied. Rachel Welcher discusses with us the way her divorce impacted her life, and she says, “Still to this day, people ask me, ‘How can I avoid your fate?’  and I say, ‘You can’t. Suffering is part of the Christian life.'”

Jess and Devi also discuss whether or not we should be preparing unmarried people for divorce the way we prepare them for relationships, and we talk about the impact of grief on the life of a Christian. 

Rachel Joy Welcher is an editor for Fathom magazine, and a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she received her Master of Letters in Bible and the Contemporary World. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Two Funerals, Then Easter and Blue Tarp, and has written for The Gospel Coalition, Mere Orthodoxy, Relevant, and The Englewood Review of Books. Rachel has spent the last few years researching the impact of modern evangelical purity culture on the Church, and her book Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press in 2020. She currently lives in Glenwood, Iowa, with her husband, Pastor Evan Welcher, and their dog, Frank. 

You can connect with Rachel on Twitter and Instagram.

Episode 9 Show Notes

Jess updates us on a church visit after what she shared at the end of Episode 7: Sexual Prosperity & Singleness

Rachel Welcher on Unwanted Divorce and the Promises of God on the By Faith podcast by Christine Hoover

Man confesses to child porn; church disciplines wife by Bob Allen for the Baptist News Global

Join our conversations about sexual ethics on Twitter and Instagram.