A Reputation for Being Alive

What's happening

For the first time in 25 years, U.S. in-person worship attendance has risen, according to a new Hartford Institute for Religion Research study of 7,453 congregations. Median attendance climbed from 45 in 2021 to 70 today; the authors say religion is "back in fashion." On May 14, Pew Research Center found 37% of Americans now say religion is gaining influence in public life, the highest share since 2002 and up 19 points in two years. The findings landed days before "Rededicate 250," a prayer gathering the Trump administration hosted on the National Mall on May 17. The rebound is uneven: theologically conservative congregations in Republican-majority areas grew most, and nearly half of all congregations still report long-term decline.

What the Text says

Sardis was a city living on its résumé. Twice it had been the wealthiest capital in the region, perched on a near-vertical ridge that made it feel unconquerable. Twice it was taken anyway, both times because sentries assumed the cliff did the watching for them. By the first century it was a comfortable place with a famous past and a thin present. The letter to its church plays on exactly that.

Revelation 3:1-21"And to the angel of the assembly in Sardis write: "He who has the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars says these things: "I know your works, that you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.2Wake up, and keep the things that remain, which you were about to throw away, for I have found no works of yours perfected before my God.

The Greek phrase translated "you have a reputation" is onoma echeis, literally "you have a name." Sardis had a name that still meant something on paper. The church there had the same problem its city had: a standing that outran its substance. The instruction is to "strengthen the things that remain." The cure is not acquisition. It is attention: waking the sentries on the cliff everyone assumed was safe. The diagnosis is precise. Reputation is a public fact. Life is not.

The reflection

A number can rise for many reasons. People show up because a neighbor invited them, because a season is anxious, because a movement is loud, because a feeling is in the air. The Hartford study counts bodies in pews and counts them honestly. What it cannot count is whether a thing is alive, and the researchers, to their credit, did not claim it could.

That is the gap the letter to Sardis names. "Back in fashion" is a sentence about visibility, about a name that still carries weight in the culture. The text treats visibility as the easiest thing to mistake for vitality, and the hardest to mistake it for safely. A church can be full and a church can be awake. They are measured by different instruments. The instrument the letter trusts is the one that works while the city sleeps and assumes the cliff is enough.