Palm Sunday is six days away. Easter follows one week after that. For two consecutive Sundays, more people will walk through church doors than at any other point in the year. The question is not whether they will show up. They will. The question is what the church does with the other six days between those two services, and what happens to the people who come once and then disappear until Christmas.
Holy Week is not just a liturgical sequence. It is the most theologically dense seven days in the Christian calendar. You have the triumphal entry, the cleansing of the temple, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the trial, the crucifixion, Holy Saturday, and the resurrection. Each one of those events carries enough weight to hold a congregation's attention for an entire evening service, and in the historic church, most of them did. Maundy Thursday services, Good Friday tenebrae services, Holy Saturday vigils, and Easter sunrise gatherings used to be regular features of how Christian communities moved through the week together. A significant number of Protestant churches dropped them somewhere along the way and replaced the full arc with a highlights reel across two Sunday mornings.
What that compression does is rob the resurrection of its full weight. Easter lands differently when you have sat in the darkness of Good Friday. The stone being rolled away means something else entirely when you have felt the weight of Holy Saturday, that in-between day when the disciples did not yet know how the story ended. Without the descent through the valley, the arrival at the empty tomb becomes a doctrine to affirm rather than an event to experience. Churches that hold full Holy Week services are giving their people something they cannot access anywhere else in the culture: a structured encounter with death and resurrection as a real event rather than a theological abstraction.
The practical case for investing in Holy Week programming is also real. Churches that add Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services typically see 15 to 20 percent of their Easter attendance show up for those midweek services once the tradition has been established for a few years. More importantly, people who attend multiple Holy Week services have a retention rate that looks meaningfully different from Easter Sunday visitors who had no prior touchpoint with the community during the week. Multiple encounters create connection. A single Sunday visit is easier to walk away from than a week of shared experience around the same story.
There is also the reality of what Palm Sunday attendance signals about a congregation. When people show up for the beginning of Holy Week, they are telling you they want more than a highlight. They are open to the full story. Churches that lean into that signal and provide intentional programming through the week, whether that is a simple Maundy Thursday service with communion and foot washing, a Good Friday reading of the passion narrative, or even a small-group Easter vigil, are meeting people at the level of their own appetite rather than asking them to be satisfied with less.
None of this requires elaborate production or significant budget. Some of the most powerful Holy Week services in Christian history were held with nothing but candles and the words of Scripture. The content is not the problem. The story is complete. The invitation that Holy Week makes to the church every year is whether it will slow down long enough to let that story breathe across the full seven days rather than compressing it into a couple of crowded Sunday services with parking line volunteers and staged chairs. Six days from now, Palm Sunday begins. The week ahead is worth planning deliberately and protecting from the tyranny of mere busyness.