...In the Aftermath of Easter...

The aftermath of Easter means different things to different people. If you are a pastor then you are likely to be in the after-glow of what God did in your services and you saw new faces and plenty of old faces return. Maybe there were people that you were praying would come but didn’t. Maybe you set new attendance records or maybe it was just another Sunday. From what I have seen pastors are typically excited and a bit worn out at the same time after Holy Week and Easter celebrations. I know that many churches add extra services for more people to attend throughout Holy Week and Easter. If you are not a pastor it probably meant you had to hunt harder for a parking spot if you went to church or if you went out to eat you had longer lines at Crackle Barrel. Here's what I experienced:

At LakePointe we had 5 worship opportunities adding 3 additional worship experiences than we normally would have. We were excited about the people that God would bring through the doors of LakePointe. We had high expectations and spent much time in prayer that God would bring those through our door who did not know about His love for them seen in Jesus. We had just under 1800 people show up (1791) to hear about an empty tomb and a risen Savior. We had hundreds of new families, and many that committed their life to following Jesus for the first time. We even set a new attendance record for our young church. As exciting as this was and still is, something hit me like a ton of bricks. Our message in the 5 Easter worship experiences was one of BELONGING, we BELONG because of Jesus. We are saved by grace through Jesus (Eph 2:8-9). We had a good crowd but I am wondering, more than wondering but praying that those who came on Easter would return. And, what about all the people in our community that didn’t go to ANY Christian church? What about them? Where are they in the Aftermath of Easter?

After further deliberation and thought, I began to look at the size of our city. Hot Springs AR, is about 39,676 according to public data source So at LakePointe we had over 4% of our population of our city show up to our church. Again, stay with me as you will see my point is not one of pride but one of sadness. A study on the national average for people who attend a church is 40% again this sounds not too bad until you look further at the stat and what it really means. When you reverse the stat we see that 60% of Americans do not attend church regularly and that number is challenged and deemed to be low, as Americans tend to exaggerate if and when they actually attend church. For my community that I am called to shepherd and reach it means that 23,805 people did not attend church last Sunday. If you include Garland County population 96,145, it means that 57,687 people in my community missed out on celebrating the love of God tangibly seen in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter! They were not at any church, they didn’t say out loud “He has risen!” they just stayed home, maybe they watched the Masters and didn’t realize the real Master wasn’t Bubba, but actually 2000+ years ago: Jesus.

In the Aftermath of Easter we must see that God is faithful and at work in many and various ways. We have so much to celebrate as we too look into an empty tomb and the cloud of witnesses to the scars on His hands, to the scar on His side. The One who defeated our sin, defeated the death we deserve, and defeats our spiritual enemy, the devil. We can celebrate those that God has brought through our doors in one hand, praying that they will return this week, again with high expectations to be discipled and grow in faith. Yet, in the other we still are reminded that there are so many that are out there in our community “Fatherless” not knowing Jesus love for them. We call them “those that are yet to come.” Yet to come to know the love of the Father, yet to understand what that means for their life, their family, and their eternity as they see Jesus as the Savior of their soul. They have yet to understand what it means to live a new life in Christ. As Romans 6 explains:

Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ
 1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

In the Aftermath of Easter may we stay in that joy we have in Christ and may that resurrection celebration never end as long we have breath in our lungs. Yet, may we still enter the gates of our cities, the places and spaces we are found, with eyes of Jesus seeing the 60% that don’t know Him. May we never lose concern or thoughts for those God loves that don’t know it. May we exist as pastors, churches, ministries, and people of God to serve Him and reach out to “those who are yet to come!” Happy Easter in Jesus’ name.