Living Underground
A Symposium on Christian Burial
Burial
Plots & Parking Lots by Russell D. Moore
Our Buried Sentiments by Wilfred M. McClay
Landscapes of the Dead by Anthony Esolen
The Grave Not Taken by David Mills
Stone Sobriety by S. M. Hutchens
In Grave Country by Darryl Hart
Burial Plots & Parking Lots
by Russell D. Moore
Drive by your local booming suburban church, or the up-and-coming congregation everyone’s talking about in your community. You might find a state-of-the-art children’s complex, complete with antibiotic soap dispensers in every corner. You might find a Family Life Center—previously known as a gym—with a basketball court, foosball tables, maybe even an Olympic-size pool. You’ll almost certainly find a feeding hall, perhaps with a franchised gourmet coffee kiosk nearby.
What you will not find is a graveyard.
Grave Reminders
Not many churches have graveyards anymore. In some ways, that’s understandable. Churches that are growing and evangelistic rightly conclude that sharing the gospel with the living is more important than remembering the dead.
We all know churches that carefully manicure their graveyards and remember who is buried where. They also remember who paid for what pillar—so don’t you try to remove it to create additional space for your children’s Bible fellowship area. For them the graveyard is a symbol of a concern more for maintaining their family genealogies and the memories of the past than forging forward for the Kingdom.
But, still. I wonder if we are losing something by outsourcing the care of our dead to the funeral industry. Did we lose something important, maybe even something biblical, when we paved over our graveyards?
The church graveyard might serve to remind us of something that we as contemporary Christians, with all our flash and verve, seem to forget too often these days. We are going to die.
Too often we seek reminders of God’s power in the buzz and energy of a campus Bible study or a youth rally or a celebrated church service. We believe that God is present among us if there are beautiful, vital young people around us. We believe there is dynamism present if our services are seamless, and if our celebrities smile or cry on cue.
And often the Spirit is there, with power. But sometimes the excitement is just that—excitement—not the longing of a people for a crucified Messiah.
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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