An inspirational meditation for Holy Saturday from Rachel Held Evans, from her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church:
“Lately I’ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection might be just what church needs right now, if maybe all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over, and if maybe that’s a good thing.
Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.
G. K Chesterton put it this way: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” I don’t know exactly what this new revolution will look like, but as the center of Christianity shifts from the global West to the global South and East, and as Christians in the United States are forced to gauge the success of the church by something other than money and power, I hope it looks like altars transforming into tables, gates transforming into open doors, and cure-alls transforming into healing oils. I hope it looks like a kingdom that belongs not to the rich, but to the poor, not to the triumphant but to the meek, not to the culture warriors but to the peacemakers. If Christianity must die, may it die to the old way of dominance and control and be resurrected to the Way of Jesus, the Way of the cross. (pp 225-226)
As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is busy making something new. As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. We might as well trust him, since he knows a thing or two about the way out of the grave.
“New life starts in the dark,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
More on Rachel Evans here:
frjamesdiluzio 
Great meditation