Wichita pastors strive to reclaim Easter as religious holiday

This Easter dawns with an economic miracle. As a country, we are projected to spend a record amount on new clothes, food, candy and gifts to mark the holiday.

But to Christian ministers, that kind of misses the point, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Every year, churches fill their Easter Sunday pews, or in some cases stadium seating, with celebrants who may or may not have been there the week before and may not be there the week after.

That’s due to a combination of factors. Some of the Easter crowd are CEOs – “Christmas and Easter Only” churchgoers. Others are fairly regular churchgoers, who attend maybe a couple of times a month but who all show up on Easter.

The Rev. Cindy Watson, pastor of West Heights United Methodist Church in Wichita, says showing up on only one day for Easter means missing 98 percent of the celebration.

In Christian tradition, Easter isn’t a day but a season, “and we have 50 days to celebrate,” she said.

In today’s world, when you turn on the TV to the latest massacre or mayhem, many Christians actually find it easier to embrace the 40 days of Lent, with its emphasis on solemnity and self-denial, she said.

For them, “To talk about life and love and joy for 50 days is too much.”

This Easter season, her message is: “We have to look at life with a different set of eyes, or lenses, to see … the new life and new possibilities and love and hope that are available. It’s in ourselves. It’s in each other.”

Spending and celebrating

Consumer spending this Easter season is expected to reach $17.3 billion, the most since the National Retail Federation began surveys about it 13 years ago.

Easter spending has risen and fallen with the national economy. This year, it is expected to be about $3 billion more than in 2007 and $4.5 billion more than during the depth of the recession in 2009.

The survey, conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics, projects the average American family will spend $146 a person on celebrating Easter, up from $140 last year.

The biggest expenditure is food, $5.5 billion, followed by clothing, $3 billion; gifts, $2.7 billion; candy, $2.4 billion; and flowers, $1.2 billion.

As for celebrating the holiday, about 58 out of 100 consumers will visit family and friends and 55.6 percent will cook a holiday meal.

Church ranked as the third most popular Easter activity at 51.3 percent.

Stealing the message

In the movie “Concussion,” the doctor who discovers the dangers of repeated head impacts in professional football is warned that he’s taking on a corporation that owns the day of the week that used to belong to the church.

That’s kind of the way the Rev. Stan Van Den Berg, pastor of Eastminster Presbyterian Church, talks about the culture of marketing and buying and spending that has come to surround Christian holidays.

“I think the culture has stolen Christmas and Easter from the church,” Van Den Berg said. “It’s stolen the message and separated it from its true power. The true power is God himself saying ‘I want to save them, I want to forgive them.’ ”

And that can be hard to get across to people amid all the trappings that have come to surround Easter.

He said the challenge for Christians isn’t just “to do the Christian thing on the holiday” but “living as a follower of Jesus every day.”

That, he said, requires more than getting some new clothes and going to church twice a year.

“Maybe you can say, ‘Who stole my holiday?’ ” Van Den Berg said. “I can see Jesus saying that.”

Recovering the holiday is hard, but worth it, he said.

And although Jesus’ message can get lost in the broader picture, Van Den Berg has seen people who come to church on Easter and end up embracing the holiday’s message of love and hope and forgiveness: alcoholics who made the commitment to get sober, couples fixing marriages that had been on the rocks and becoming happy again, young people at risk who get their lives going in the right direction.

“All I can do is share the message of hope and pray that people will believe it … and start seeing a change in their lives,” he said.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Wichita pastors strive to reclaim Easter as religious holiday."