Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting

“But I don’t wanna go to church!” Marva Dawn has often heard that cry—and not only from children. “What a sad commentary it is on North American spirituality,” she writes, “that the delight of ‘keeping the Sabbath day’ has degenerated into the routine and drudgery—even the downright oppressiveness—of ‘going to church.’”

According to Dawn, the phrase “going to church” both reveals and promotes bad theology: it suggests that the church is a static place when in fact the church is the people o...