Flashback Friday: A Plea to Pastors on Easter Weekend
Every Friday I dig into the archives and dust off an old post. If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you!
Pastors: they’re coming.
Easter weekend is one of the two largest church attendance weekends in any calendar year. People attend church with Grandma. Irreligious people come because it’s still the socially acceptable thing to do in some parts of the country. Folks who are normally sporadic in attendance wouldn’t think of skipping church on Easter.
And pastors…well, we pastors don’t generally know what to do with the new-found fullness of our auditoriums. So we freak out. We nervously resort to humor or snarkiness or futile attempts at bridging the gap.
We say things like, “We want to extend a welcome to the poinsettia and lily crowd!” or “Thanks for coming. We’ll see you again at Christmas.” (No seriously, I’ve heard both of these things said by a real pastor to a real congregation.) And while we think it’s cute, or funny, or disarming, it’s really anything but.
