Imagine that as you arrived at church to worship God on a Sunday morning, you first walked past the graves of friends who had served the church faithfully before going to their rest. Imagine if over there was the grave of a former pastor who had led you to Christ, baptized you, married you, and preached hundreds of sermons that instructed your mind and bolstered your faith. Imagine if over here was the grave shared by your parents and beyond it the grave of your husband or wife, or even the grave of your child. Imagine if there was an empty plot that was waiting for you, a spot in which you would be laid with your people—your family and your church.

I have often been asked what I consider the greatest weakness of today’s church or what I would change about today’s church if I could. Such questions make for good discussion at a conference Q&A session but they are also pretty much impossible to answer in a compelling way. It’s not like any of us has the right to speak for much more than our own little congregation. It’s not like any of us has a broad enough knowledge to understand the whole church. And it’s not like any one of us has the ability to swing the rudder of Christendom and cause it to change its course.

Yet with all that said, there is one thing churches used to do that they no longer do, and I often wish we could recover it. So, if I could change anything about the modern church, perhaps it would be this: I would return the graveyard to the churchyard.

It used to be customary for churches to have a graveyard. If you visit older church buildings in Europe and North America, there is a pretty good chance they are either fully surrounded by graves or have a portion of their property dedicated to them. The people who once worshipped inside are now buried outside. In this way, there was an ongoing link between the saints triumphant and the saints militant, the congregants in heaven and the congregants on earth.

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