Living as Easter People

The Easter Season at Faith

“Do not abandon yourselves to despair.
We are an Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”
-Pope John Paul II 

In 2021, Gallup released a poll that the majority of Americans no longer belong to a place of worship, be it a church, mosque, or synagogue. This was the first time in Gallup’s 8-decade history that the majority of people in the US no longer identify with a community of faith.

Church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937, and this trend remained steady for about 6 decades. Even in 1999, it was still 70%. Today, it’s 47%, which shows more than a 20-point decline from the turn of the century.

Gallup’s most recent poll reveals that two decades ago, an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. A decade ago, the figure fell to 38%, and it is currently at 30%.

A friend of mine and former church member, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, was asked to write a response to this poll for CNN. Guthrie writes:

Church decline is not a rejection of our message of love, it’s a rejection of our movement’s failure to model that message for the world. [But] I’m hopeful for a resurrection of…Christianity in America that lives up to the teachings of Jesus. This Easter, I hope my fellow Christians who deeply care about the future of our movement to spread the Gospel of love will recommit ourselves to build a movement that more people [actually] want to join.

And I believe that work of resurrection begins with us – with how you and I choose to respond to the good news of Easter. This Easter season at Faith, I’m inviting us to reflect on what Easter really means to us and what difference it makes in our lives and in our world today. When we exclaimed together on Easter morning that, “Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!” – what were we actually celebrating?

Clarence Jordan once said that “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.”

We weren’t there to see the empty tomb. There is still so much that we don’t know about what happened. But at the end of the day, I believe that Christ is risen because of the resurrection I have encountered in my own life and in the lives of others. I believe in Easter, not because of something that happened two thousand years ago, but because of the risen Christ I still see and experience among us today.

Our world is in desperate need of some resurrection right now, isn’t it? But I believe that new life and liberation begins within us. What would it look like for us as Faith to live as Easter people? Join us in worship this month as we explore more together.