Churches around the world are gearing up for the year's most widely attended worship service—Resurrection Sunday. People who never participate in corporate worship will arrive for Easter Sunday services. So what can your church do to prepare to welcome visitors, newcomers, and even long time members who haven't made it to church any other time? Perhaps more than cleaning the building, printing welcome pamphlets, mailing invitations or ordering lilies for the platform, there is a radical shift in thinking that church leaders should consider.

New perspective on church attendance

While it may be tempting to count up the masses on Easter and drop that inflated number into conversations with other ministers all year, the numbers really aren't all they're counted up to be. The temptation with numbers comes not only in the church growth, and therefore success, they may represent, but also in the way they turn something spiritual, messy and complicated—namely faith—into something very concrete. This is an artificial categorization at best. Even an average attendance number is still far from describing the essence of your church. In fact, it may be far from describing American Christianity today.

Americans have long exhibited a disconnect between faith and church attendance. While 84 percent of Americans consider themselves Christians, according to author and researcher George Barna, only about 40 percent say they attend church regularly.

Among those adults who remain unchurched, defined by Barna as people who haven't attended religious services in six months, most (56 percent) consider themselves Christians. In fact, some 15 percent of the unchurched espouse orthodox theology, saying they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and believe they will go to heaven. That's an estimated 11 million adults who are born again and unchurched.

The irony of Barna's research over the past few decades is the lack of correlation between orthodox faith and church attendance. Americans who believe Jesus is the Savior of the world may not go to church, while churchgoers may not believe Jesus is the Savior. Church attendance is not longer the litmus test for faithful followers, if it ever was.

Revolution

Barna's new book "Revolution," examines a new understanding of believers, a group he calls "Revolutionaries" because of their "complete dedication to being thoroughly Christian by viewing every moment of life through a spiritual lens and making every decision in light of biblical principles."

This revolution is about spiritual authenticity—a hallmark value of the younger generations and thus a strong force that Barna says will reshape American Christianity in the next few decades. In fact, Barna is jumping on the revolution bandwagon and encouraging all within earshot of his bestselling book to do the same. He writes that he is at once discouraged by what his research has shown among Christians in the last 20-plus years and encouraged by the spiritual authenticity of the revolutionaries. So he is looking for faith wherever he can find it and challenging Christians with the idea that it might not be in church.

"What matters is not whom you associate with (i.e., a local church), but who you are," Barna writes. "If the local church is God's answer to our spiritual needs, then why are most churched Christians so spiritually immature and desperate?" He finds not only churches in decline, unhealthy congregations where there is little discipleship, less evangelism and no growth to be hopeless. He predicts more decline in local church attendance, along with rises in alternative faith-based communities, such as small groups, house churches, homeschooling groups, accountability groups, etc., and a continued rise in Christian media, arts and culture.

What about Easter?

So what does all this have to do with the biggest Sunday of the year? If Barna's revolution replaces this church-going tradition with a transcendent faith that is lived in every aspect of life, all year long, and not just dressed up in an Easter bonnet, church leaders should welcome it. In fact, church leaders should call their congregants to radical faith; faith that doesn't start and stop in the sanctuary, but faith that prays without ceasing and makes the most of every opportunity in the marketplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools, parks, cities.

Can preachers say that to a crowd who arrives only for Easter?

Maybe that is exactly who they should say it to, because these are the people who are out in the world, usually even on Sundays.

If they are revolutionaries already they will resonate with a message to glorify God and build the Kingdom.

If they are nominal Christians, suckered into Easter church traditions, they should know that checking church off their list no longer cuts it and that Christ has called them to life in abundance with him.

If they are unchurched agnostics, atheists or followers of other religions, they should know the life transformation Christianity intends.