05/20/2026
Church in the Summertime
(adapted from a blog post by Scott Sauls)
Want to know how healthy a church really is? Don’t look at the Easter crowd. Look at the Sunday after July 4.
That Sunday in July is, statistically, the lowest attended Sunday of the year in most American churches. The lawn chairs are out, the swimming pools and lake houses are open, the kids are out of school, and the rhythms of summer have settled in. For many of us, worship with a local church becomes one option among many, and often not the option we choose.
I am not raising this to scold anyone. I raise it because I think many of us have largely forgotten what church is for, what it does for us when we are there, and what we and our neighbors lose when we are not.
Eugene Peterson, in his book Practice Resurrection, puts it this way: “So, why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death.”
A colony of heaven.
In the country of death.
Peterson is saying that the world we live in, for all its truth and goodness and beauty, is an anxious, battle-worn country in which every person and place and thing groans with longing for something more life-giving and durable. It is a place where marriages come apart and friendships fade, where hopes wear down and faith itself can erode under the steady pressure of one loss or disappointment after another. It’s the country of death by a thousand cuts.
Into that country, the Holy Spirit has planted a colony. But the colony runs on a different timetable, speaks a different language, and answers to a different king. That colony also has a street address, and the address is your local church.
Peterson, informed by the word of God, does not say the church is one option among many for following Jesus. He says it is the core feature of the Holy Spirit’s strategy. Following Jesus was always meant to be a “we” thing and not a “me” thing. The local church is God’s plan A, his plan B, and his plan C.
There is no plan D.
Satan doesn’t have to disenchant you one Sunday at a time, because the season itself does most of the work for him. All he has to do is convince you that this stretch of the year is different. The kids need a break, and so do you. The lake is calling, the beach is calling, the brunch table and swimming pool are calling, and surely God is generous enough to give you a pass on a Sunday or two, or six. And then before you know it, twelve Sundays slip by and you have lost touch with local church life. Slowly but surely, it has become out of sight and out of mind.
By Labor Day, you are not the same person you were in May, though you may not be able to put your finger on what is missing. But something definitely is.
To be clear, church attendance is not the only sign of a healthy disciple. A person who shows up every Sunday and then treats their spouse with contempt on Monday is not a healthy disciple, and neither is the one who reads the Bible and Christian books daily but refuses to forgive their neighbor. Jesus made this point with unmistakable force in Matthew 23, and we are wise not to soften it.
But while Sunday attendance is not the only sign, it is among the essential ones. The church is not a building where you drop in on the way to your real life. It is the colony in which you are formed for that real life.
Consider what the local church gives you that nothing else can. There is the reading of Scripture out loud over your soul, week after week, until the words begin to live within you (Colossians 3:16). There is the bread and the cup, those physical gifts of a physical Savior, placed into your physical hands (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). There is the gathered worship of God’s people, which the writer of Hebrews calls indispensable to our perseverance (Hebrews 10:24-25).
And there is the esence of the weak, the elderly, the troubled, and the new believer, whose needs and encouragements and even demands on you will shape your discipleship in ways no podcast or sunrise devotion ever could.
The kingdom of God is not just an idea you can stream or consume on a podcast. It is a people you stand next to and sometimes get into the trenches with. It is, as someone once said, Jesus with skin on.
The church gathers not so God’s people can become a holy huddle, but so we can be sent back out. Having been centered in Christ on Sunday, we are equipped to carry his presence into what Peterson bleakly calls “the country of death” the rest of the week, loving our neighbors and doing our work with integrity, forgiving and loving and reconciling with our enemies and weeping with those who weep, speaking the truth in our families and bearing witness in our offices and in all the places where we live, work, and play.
The summer Sunday you skip by choice is not only a Sunday you missed. It is a Monday through Saturday where you end up going out into the world a little less formed and a little less rooted, and a little more shaped by the country of death than by the colony of heaven.
So this summer, when the question comes (do we go, or do we sleep in, or do we stay at the lake one more day, or do we look up the nearest church in the town we are visiting), see if you can hear what actually lies beneath the question. You are not choosing between church and rest. You are choosing where your heart, soul, mind, and strength will be nourished and centered, and the place from which your life will be sent back into the world.
The colony is beckoning, the Spirit is at work, and your people—even the ones you have not yet met—are saving you a seat.
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