Kinship with the dead doesn't have to be spooky
Christianity Today
October 21, 2026
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Marcia Straub / Getty
Last month I took my kids to visit a small family cemetery where my father and brother are buried. My 4-year-old, full of questions, had never seen a tombstone before. Her total ignorance reminded me that we live in a world where death exists mostly as an abstraction: We may acknowledge it as a reality, but we avoid any meaningful proximity to it.
The one notable exception is the Halloween season, that stretch of weeks every fall when our death-avoidant culture reveals its underlying fascination with mortality and the afterlife. Already the houses on my street are transforming into macabre scenes full of skeletons and plastic tombstones.
To be clear, this is not a Halloween hit piece. My kids are already planning their trick-or-treat costumes. But I do grieve that our cultural imagination about death and graves has been reduced to one genre (horror).
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Death is mysterious. Life after death can seem, literally, haunting. But for Christians, graves historically have been more comforting than creepy. For the majority of church history, worship took place in the physical presence of departed saints. In our clueless but death-curious world, this ancient witness is worth recovering. Kinship with the dead does not have to be spooky.
For the earliest Christians, worship among graves was an act of hope amid persecution. In The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Louis Wilken writes, “Early in the church’s history Christians gathered at the tombs of martyrs to pray and celebrate the Eucharist.” Their choice to worship amid departed believers was a demonstration of their faith in the communion of the saints and the resurrection of the body.
It was also a little punk rock. Their eucharistic celebrations, in which they proclaimed Jesus’ ability to overturn death, were a dismissal of the empire’s ultimate power. They believed Jesus’ words in John 11:25: “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (ESV).
And whether or not Christians worshiped in the catacombs before Christianity was legal, they did rebrand death by naming their catacombs coemeterium (Greek for “dormitory,” implying their dead were merely sleeping) and decorating them with biblical images of resurrection. Far from downplaying or avoiding death, the early church attended to it as part of worship.
Long after persecution faded from memory in the Western church, Christians still routinely housed the dead in or near their places of worship. In the Middle Ages, it was common for churches to display bodies of departed saints in ossuaries (think “bone boxes”) or sarcophagi (aboveground tombs) in their sanctuaries.
Sometimes, saints’ remains were associated with devotion to those particular heroes, and their relics were believed to have healing powers (a notion derived from biblical stories like Elisha’s bones raising someone from the dead in 2 Kings 13:21 and Paul’s handkerchiefs being used to heal people in Acts 19:11–12). But ordinary and anonymous Christians were also buried in crypts and graveyards on church property, illustrating the belief that all the faithful departed remain a part of God’s people, the “great cloud of witnesses” in heaven and on earth (Heb. 12:1).
After the Reformation, in both Protestant Europe and America, it remained standard practice for churches to house graveyards. This eventually changed due to logistics, not theology: As urbanization increased, church graveyards became overcrowded, and sanitation became a problem. After a rainstorm unsettled the burial grounds in a French church and decaying bodies spilled out onto other properties, rural cemeteries became more common.
America’s first modern cemetery, opened in 1831, was dubbed a “garden of graves” and gave rise to the nation’s first public parks—places for the living as well as the dead. Their popularity for activities like picnics and carriage rides indicates that people still considered graveyards a comfortable place to visit with family and friends. But over time, as mortality declined with the rise of medicinal advances and death was increasingly outsourced to the funeral industry, cemeteries became places only for the dead. Slowly, our cultural imagination around death became shrouded in mystery and unease: the stuff of spooky stories.
When researching for this article, I was surprised to discover that churches did not initially abandon graveyards for aesthetic or theological reasons. However, their disappearance from our regular sight has shaped our theology.
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Recently on a church revitalization podcast, I heard someone quip that it’s “not a good look” to have a graveyard outside a church. I understand his point—as Russell Moore once put it, “Churches that are growing and evangelistic rightly conclude that sharing the Gospel with the living is more important than remembering the dead.”
However, Moore also asked, “Did we lose something important, maybe even something biblical, when we paved over our graveyards?” In myriad ways, yes, we did.
When I think about my 4-year-old, a lifelong churchgoer who had never touched a tombstone, I want her to learn a story about death other than what she’ll one day deduce from Halloween decorations and scary movies. I want her and other young Christians to know that death is real and concrete, but not to be feared. Exposure to buried believers as those who still belong to Christ is an age-appropriate reminder of both the wages of sin and the hope of the Resurrection: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).
We don’t seek fellowship with the dead through seances or witchcraft, but in our worship of the risen Christ, we do participate in a communion of saints that reaches beyond the grave and will one day undo it.
Logistically, Christians’ relationship with graves and graveyards might have permanently changed. But relegating them entirely to cultural narratives is a mistake. Christians can and should still prophetically bear witness to the fact that the power of death belongs to the one who can raise us from it.
Hannah Miller King is associate rector of The Vine Anglican Church in Clyde, North Carolina, and author of Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.
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