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Most Protestants don’t think much about the day sandwiched between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. That day is called Holy Saturday, the in-between time as we await the resurrection of Jesus. It was on this day that Disciples of Christ pastor Katherine Willis Pershey wrote an article about the denomination where she has served for nearly two decades: the United Church of Christ.
Holy Saturday is an in-between moment. As an article in Mockingbird wrote: “Holy Saturday is the day the disciples didn’t know what to think. The tomb was sealed. Jesus was dead. They had believed he was the one who would redeem Israel — and now they were sitting in an upper room, terrified, trying to figure out what any of it had meant. They were not in despair, exactly — they hadn’t yet had time to fully reckon with what had happened. But they certainly weren’t celebrating. They were just … waiting. In the in-between. In the not-yet.”
In Katherine’s Substack post, “The Life, Death and Resurrection of the United Church of Christ,” Pershey talks about an in-between phase of the UCC. She highlights the bold witness of the denomination, such as being the first to ordain openly gay and lesbian pastors. But she also wrote about some of the challenges facing the denomination: pastoral shortages and shrinking congregations, and the temptation to focus on human efforts instead of the grace of God.
There is a lot of talk about the decline of the mainline, but in keeping with being on the edge of Easter, this is a conversation about hope.
Katherine serves as one of the co-pastors at First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Appleton, Wisconsin. A native Ohioan, she received her Master of Divinity degree from the Claremont School of Theology in California and recently completed a Doctor of Ministry degree on the theme Holy Presence: Eugene Peterson and the Pastoral Imagination from Western Theological Seminary in Michigan. Before serving First Congregational, she served as Associate Pastor of The First Congregational Church of Western Springs, Illinois, for fourteen years.
Shownotes:
Life, Death, and Resurrection in the United Church of Christ (Katherine’s Substack)
Please, liberal Christians, read Eugene Peterson (Katherine’s article in the Christian Century)
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