Lingering in Church Graveyards
A vision for the future church
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Ross Byrd
THE OTHER DAY, I met separately with two men who attend two different Evangelical churches in my town. The conversations felt eerily similar. Both mentioned non-Christian friends who had recently grown interested in the faith, so naturally we talked about books and small group meetings they could recommend. They were encouraged. Yet, in each conversation, as we shifted to the topic of church, I felt the spirit in the room subtly change.
It wasn’t that their churches were uninviting to outsiders. To the contrary, unbelievers were more than welcome. It was the men themselves who felt increasingly restless in their own places of worship. “I just don’t know how much longer we can do it,” one of the men confessed. He’d been a key volunteer in the church for over a decade. He wasn’t bitter. He didn’t launch into a tirade about problematic leaders or programs. It felt almost worse than that—he’d simply given up hope that his church could be a place of deep spiritual life and health.
For those that haven’t been attending, the church does seem to be coming back in style—or at least to be highly intriguing. I believe this increased interest is a good time for those of us within the church to take stock. What do we have to offer to both newcomers and to members already sitting in our pews? And where might we find ourselves embarrassingly unequipped?
IN MY OWN TOWN over the past thirty years or so, mainline decline has given way to an Evangelical non-denominational hay-day. The old steeples of Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches still dot the landscape of our neighborhoods, but not as the pinnacles of faith they used to be. Instead, these buildings stand as though they were the fossilized remains of some ancient species that has since gone extinct. It’s the giant warehouse-style buildings, with even larger parking lots, that now run the show.
The internet came to the forefront of our cultural moment around the same time traditional churches were breathing their dying breath. Up-and-coming Evangelical churches who were already pushing “cultural relevance” had little trouble adapting to the age of the internet, with elegant websites and, eventually, huge followings on social media. They didn’t exactly make the church come back in style—many of them disdained the religiousness of traditional churches anyway—but instead aimed to bring style back into the church. Their content, they assured themselves, would remain “orthodox.” The delivery was what needed to change.
Churches that adopted the forms of the internet into their body were duly rewarded with rapidly growing congregations, buildings, and bank accounts. Now, it seems, they may have “received their reward in full.”
AS PHILOSOPHER Marshall McLuhan famously noted, the medium tends to become the message, and as a result, many Evangelical churchgoers are growing weary. The old church buildings and services of our grandparents’ childhood may have appeared boring and irrelevant—designed as they were for prayer and silent reflection, weddings, baptisms, and funerals—but since our present churches have been optimized for entertainment and advertisement, we’re beginning to feel the loss. The message, indeed, must be heard, but man cannot live on truth alone. Without beauty in particular, the soul starves.
Don’t get me wrong. Our mega-church parking lots are still mostly full on Sunday mornings. But the lots remain full of cars in much the same way that our Instagram feeds remain full of content: the people are still coming, but they aren’t exactly thrilled to be there. Exhaustion has set in. A certain subtle odor, eerily resembling the beginning of mainline decline, can now be sensed in the Evangelical non-denom corner of the world. These growing cracks in the non-denom empire now appear to be coinciding with a new and widespread interest in more traditional forms of Christianity. I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had recently with young Evangelicals pondering conversion to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
In my own community, we are in the early stages of developing a new (old) parish model of church, focusing on three key attributes. Our churches must become local, restful, and holy—acting as an antidote to the disembodied, frenetic, and addicted spirit of our helplessly online age.
To me, at least, this is where we must go.
WE BURIED MY GRANDMOTHER a few months back. The cemetery behind the historic Baptist church where she sang in the choir for more than sixty years is still, thankfully, in use. Her plot next to my grandfather had been reserved since his untimely death some fifty years before. It was the first churchyard burial I had attended in years. As I led the burial liturgy, with our family and her few remaining friends just steps away from the place she had worshipped for most of her life, I was struck by a deep sense of continuity, which has become harder and harder to find these days. It felt refreshingly Christian.
When I was a kid in the 90’s, the empty field behind our Episcopal church was used for a different purpose. It was the best field in the neighborhood for pickup ballgames. I can still remember the trees—no longer there—which once marked our boundaries and endzones. Though the congregation dates back to the 1800’s, the current location was not consecrated until sometime in the 1950’s. Any earlier, perhaps, and there would have been gravestones instead of endzones in the churchyard of my childhood. Of course, I don’t lament the use it gave us. What I do lament is the fact that that same field was later paved for extra parking.
Graveyards and ballfields, to different degrees, are both places where love and connection find embodiment. Ballfields help form friendships. Graveyards bind generations-long communities. Larger parking lots, on the other hand, sacrifice community for a better customer experience.
Our future churches must aim to return to a neighborhood-based model, encouraging people to re-embody their faith, worship, and obedience where they live—and to do so alongside their actual neighbors. Your neighbors are hurting, my neighbors are hurting, and many of them are believers. Yet, our family, and most we know, travel at least twenty minutes each Sunday, passing by the steepled churches on the edge of our own neighborhoods, to attend churches more attuned to our personal preferences. Others in our church do the same, coming from the opposite direction, which means they may live forty minutes away from us. For years now, we have been worshipping in a body with which we cannot sustainably share our lives.
The invention of the car has given us options, but it has also tricked us into becoming consumers of our “favorite” church experiences rather than long-game participants in our given communities. Many of us have lost the sense of generational loyalty and commitment that comes with a long-term tie to a particular place. Again, an odd proof of this can be witnessed in the increasing transformation of churchyards, which once might have been used as cemeteries, into satellite parking lots. And the megachurches are not the only culprits here.
The church must become re-embodied in our local neighborhoods, so that it may once again enact the love of God through love of neighbor.
IT USED TO BE our melodic bells and our beautiful steeples that reminded busy, lonely, scared, and suffering souls to turn their eyes and ears heavenward. Now we all seem to move to the beat of a more harried cultural drum. “His yoke is easy, and his burden is light,” we declare, just after drumming up a new wave of volunteers for various ministry teams. Maybe we have forgotten our call to give rest to the weary.
Our churches should be beautiful, restful places of prayer and silence, feasting and fasting, joy and grief. The infrastructure for this may certainly require careful planning and execution, but it does not require programs and advertisements, busy pastors and busier volunteers—expending themselves toward the end of an ever-increasing number of consumer offerings for parishioners who are already too busy to keep coming. Our churches should not compete with or imitate the rhythms of the secular world, but should rather become a kind of holy refuge.
The man I mentioned at the beginning of this piece was all too familiar with this exhaustion. The church he attended had become a marketplace of religious consumer goods. Even the CEO-type pastor and his “staff” had found themselves increasingly stretched to keep up with the pace of their own, albeit excellent, organization. But again, the medium is the message.
It wasn’t long ago that every priest in my own tradition (Anglican) was required to fulfill a very different set of standards. These included a simple, behind-the-scenes rubric for their own spiritual integrity and for the integrity of the church: morning and evening prayer at a bare minimum, devotions and fasting in preparation for Holy Eucharist, etc. Of course, such commitments require precious time that might otherwise be spent in staff meetings planning and strategizing successful programs, services, and sermons.
We need our ministers to move at the pace of prayer and devotion, so that we can move at the pace of God. When they don’t, the congregation doesn’t either, and we all pay the price. I have literally been in meetings where parishioners complained, “All Christians are called to pray. Why should our ministers be paid for it? If our pastors are going to be paid ‘salaries’ like us, shouldn’t they be expected to work like us?” Yet this is precisely the logic that has led, not only to a generation of exhausted (and often unaccountable) pastors, but also to exhausted (and often unaccountable) churches.
Our priests and ministers must be given permission to be un-busy, holy people who are daily present in the sanctuary to pray with those who need prayer, to mourn with those who mourn, and to be present for the body of believers. They should provide and prescribe holy rhythms for the people of God, which set us apart from the breakneck pace of the world around us. It is their job to lead by example and it is our job to follow in their footsteps. If they do—and if we do—the harried world around us will flee to us rather than the other way around.
PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANTLY, the church must be set apart. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe we’re living in a moment where outsiders might actually prefer to be asked to pick up their crosses rather than merely “come as they are.” Those haunted by meaning crises and online addictions don’t so much want to be welcomed, they want to be shown a new way to be. They want a truth that demands something of them.
The Billy Graham generation, we might say, enjoyed the blessings of a “Joseph moment,” befriending heads of state and filling stadiums with new converts. But the page has turned, and now we’re all slaves in Egypt. Our “Moses moment” has begun, and those willing to leave the ways of the Empire behind will find a “mixed multitude” following at their heels. The best evangelism today is a holy church—one that is prepared to call those seeking faith into a consecrated way of life.
It’s time we took McLuhan’s claim seriously. If the medium is the message, we need to pay closer attention to our forms of church, not just our content, and to reshape these forms for the health of the future body. In doing so, we can reclaim the best of what was lost when our grandparent’s small neighborhood churches passed away, and marry it to the best of what we have to offer now. Perhaps then, the weary churchgoer will find respite, and the seeking unbeliever will find a faith worth following.
Ross Byrd
Teacher & Writer
Ross Byrd is the teaching director at Virginia Beach Fellows. He and his wife, Hannah, have four children and make their living running Surf Hatteras, a destination surf camp for kids in the Outer Banks, NC. His essays have been published at Mere Orthodoxy as well as on his Substack, Patient Kingdom.
📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders
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oh, so you want me to lose my volunteer staff of 700 people for the sake of a few souls and a neighborhood ?
wiiiiiild
"The old church buildings and services of our grandparents’ childhood may have appeared boring and irrelevant—designed as they were for prayer and silent reflection, weddings, baptisms, and funerals—but since our present churches have been optimized for entertainment and advertisement, we’re beginning to feel the loss." My twenty-something daughter is not interested in church right now, but she loves cathedrals. She will sit in silence and marvel at the stories told in stained glass and allow her eyes to be drawn upward by the soaring ceilings. The medium is indeed the message and there something in her that is still drawn to that message despite her self-proclaimed ambivalence about faith.