Heading Back to the Pews this Easter

It’s been five years since I attended church on Easter. Recently, I started attending church again with my family, and so this Easter, I will join Christians around the world and attend an Easter service.

I don’t care about labels as much as I used to, and sometimes I think they get in the way, but I never stopped considering myself a Christian just because I stopped attending church. In fact, I didn’t really have an intention when I stopped attending church. It started with Covid. I had already put my notice in to the Sunday School director that I planned to be done teaching in May, and then Covid unexpectantly shut down churches in March.

Everything in my world unraveled at once—that same month, my marriage ended, the world shut down, and I stopped going to church.

There were some who looked at my life at that point and thought I failed. Others who saw me as a sinner, for I was getting a divorce and not attending church.

But if there’s one thing that Easter teaches us, it’s that death can lead to life. And some things in my life had to die.

The death process was painful. There was the death, and there was the tomb. Rising again is not immediate. We have to be okay with the darkness, with the time of mourning and anguish… this, too, is part of Easter.

So, along with most of the world, I didn’t attend an Easter service in 2020. But then I didn’t again in 2021. Or 2022. Or 2023. In that time, I set aside organized church and found God in other places—in nature and through metaphors, in books and through friends near and far, in giving and in receiving. In the pain and the tears and the letting go. In the ashes.

I let go of expectations. I experienced God deeply outside of a church building—more deep than I had ever known—and knew I didn’t need to be in a church to know the divine. While I missed aspects of church, I didn’t know if I would ever be back. I knew I needed to honor my own soul’s path. I had many beautiful-souled friends in churches, and it was right for them, but that didn’t mean it was right for me.

Last fall, however, I began feeling a desire to be back in a church pew. So my family began visiting churches. It was a long, frustrating, and painful process. We spent hours online researching churches and narrowed it down, but as we visited the well-researched churches, we kept crossing them off our list, for various reasons, until there were none left.

I felt frustration and wondered if I would ever find a church again. I knew I didn’t need a church to know God, but the desire was there in my heart. We took a few months off and had a baby. And then, I had a renewed sense of hope, and it was like a church showed up out of nowhere. A church that had been there all along, but we hadn’t realized it. A church that checked our boxes… one that we could sit in and say, “It is well with my soul.”

And, so, this Easter, I’m heading back to the pews after five years away. It feels right that this is the time of the year that I am joining a church again. Winter has passed. Spring is coming. I entered the long season of death, and let everything pass away that needed to. And now, it’s Easter. New life is rising again. It’s so much more beautiful than it was before, but it’s only possible because of the season of death.