Downsizing
Letting Go of Evangelicalism’s Nonessentials
- Christian Living
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
Evangelical Christianity has accumulated too many practices, habits, and trends that get in the way of authentic Christian faith. It’s time to downsize. Michelle Van Loon came to faith in Jesus as a Jewish teenager and embraced the first Christian community she found: evangelicals. Over the next fifty years, she enthusiastically worshiped and worked in a wide variety of evangelical groups. Looking back on those experiences today, Van Loon treasures the things that truly deepened her faith. At the same time, she laments the accumulation of baggage—religious ideas and practices that were unhelpful at best, and harmful at worst. Unlike many who have given up on evangelicalism altogether, Van Loon is committed to saving what’s worthwhile in the evangelical faith tradition, and she invites others to join her. Simultaneously critical and hopeful, Downsizing encourages readers to reflect on their own experience with evangelicalism, evaluate the movement’s legacy, and participate in shaping its future.
Endorsements (3)
“This is the time and place for Michelle Van Loon’s book. She has a knack for speaking wisdom into our deepest needs. Here, she does the necessary work of deconstructing our distortions of the gospel and reconstructing the ancient, relevant, and Spirit-filled foundations of our faith. This is a book for all of us. The church will emerge stronger for it.”
“Downsizing is a gentle and necessary invitation to recognize that perhaps the church has invested too much time and money in things with little lasting value. Michelle Van Loon challenges the assumption that more activity, more ambition, and more noise equal more faith. What if the way forward is actually less—less control, fewer accessories, smaller footprints? In a world where oversized expressions of Christianity often drown out the quiet voice of God, Downsizing offers a vision of quiet resistance: a simpler, sturdier faith that makes room for grace. With clarity and conviction, Michelle paints a picture of life rooted not in the religious rituals we clench tightly in our fists, but in the Spirit—and in love.”
“Across the centuries, the church has made a habit of shedding harmful practices with the hope of future flourishing. Michelle Van Loon’s wisdom helps us see this pattern and apply it to our own cultural moment. Downsizing encourages us to tend to the weeds overwhelming contemporary Christian faith so that the church can bloom again.”–”
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