Holy Week and the Future of the Church

by: Rev. Cameron Trimble

It is Holy Week. Most congregations will move through the familiar sequence: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday. We know this story. We know how to tell it. We know where it goes.

But for a lot of us this year, the story isn’t just something we’re remembering. It’s something we’re inside of.

There’s a reality settling over congregations across the country that’s genuinely hard to name. The church we inherited — the one most of us were formed in — isn’t holding together the way it used to.

The shape of it is recognizable enough. A building. People gathered on Sunday morning. A pastor responsible for the sermon, the sick, and the spreadsheets. Committees, programs, a calendar that gave common life its rhythm. That model shaped many of us. It built communities that actually cared for one another. It carried the gospel in ways that left a mark, and in many places, it still does. But in plenty of others, the seams are showing.

Attendance keeps sliding. Budgets are getting harder to balance. Old buildings are demanding more than small congregations can give. Leaders are worn down. And more and more people are quietly asking the same question: how much longer can we keep doing this?

This is a structural reckoning, and it’s going to take some honesty to face it.

Holy Week gives us a way to understand what is happening. Good Friday is not abstract, and it is not symbolic language for something else. It is the account of something genuine coming to an end, something that carried meaning, gathered people, and formed identity. And it ended. There is no way to move through that story without acknowledging loss.

That is where many congregations are right now, confronting the limits of a form of life that no longer functions in the same way.

The instinct, especially among leaders, is to fix it: to reorganize, develop new programs, find strategies that will stabilize what is already in place. Some of that work matters, but it doesn’t address the deeper question. The question is not how to preserve a particular model of congregational life. The question is how to remain faithful to the way of Jesus as the forms that carried it change.

Scripture is clearer about this than we sometimes admit. “What does the Lord require of you,” the prophet Micah asks, “but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” That is not a blueprint for institutional design. It is a description of a way of life.

This means the future of the church is not tied to any single structure of pews, pulpits, committees, buildings. It is tied to whether communities continue to live in that Way.

If we look carefully, we can already see this happening. Communities are gathering around tables they transform into sanctuaries. Networks are coordinating food distribution, housing support, and legal accompaniment. Small groups are meeting for prayer, study, and shared life without the expectation that everything centers on Sunday morning. Leaders are experimenting with forms of ministry that don’t require a single full-time clergy role to hold everything together. Most of this is not polished, and much of it doesn’t yet have a name. But it is real.

What is emerging is not a replacement model; it is a proliferation. Instead of one dominant way of being a congregation, there are many. Some will stay connected to traditional congregational life, with new expectations and on a different scale. Others will look very different from what people recognized a generation ago. We are seeing such creative adaptation.

There is grief in this moment, and it should not be minimized. Many of us love the church as we have known it. We were formed in it, sustained by it, and some of us have given our lives to it. It is not easy to admit that the church is changing, sometimes so much that it is hard to recognize.

Good Friday is honest about that. Something real is being lost. But Holy Week does not end there. What the tradition insists on, though it does not explain how, is that new life comes not by restoring what was, but by moving through loss into something new.

That is harder to trust. It requires patience, attention, and a willingness to let go of control over outcomes. It also requires work.

Congregations are not detached spectators in this transition. They are participants. The work in front of us is not to predict the future or replicate someone else’s model. It is to pay attention to what is actually happening in our own communities and to respond with clarity and courage. Where are people experiencing need? Where are relationships forming? Where is there energy for shared life, for service, for spiritual practice? Those are the places to begin.

At Convergence, we are working with congregations that are asking these questions directly — not just how to save what has been, but what is needed now; not just how to maintain a structure, but how to organize life together in ways that are faithful, sustainable, and responsive to the moment we are in. In many cases, this involves letting some things end. In others, it means experimenting with new forms of gathering, leadership, and ministry. There is no single answer, but there is real work to do.

Holy Week does not offer a strategy. It offers a pattern. Something ends. There is a period where nothing is clear. Something new emerges. We are in that pattern now.

The future of the church will not be decided in theory. It will be shaped in communities willing to remain present, act with integrity, and build forms of life that can actually sustain the work of justice, kindness, and humility.

That has always been the task. It still is.