How many sermons have you heard on grief? For most churchgoers in the UK, the honest answer is: very few. Yet grief is one of the most universal human experiences — and one of the most isolating, particularly when the community around you seems to expect that faith should make loss easier to bear.

David Oliver's essay in Premier Christianity, published yesterday, makes a searching and compassionate case for a new theology of grief. He begins with a striking observation: many lifelong churchgoers have never once heard a sermon on the subject. The result is that when loss comes — and it always comes — people are left to navigate it largely alone, often carrying an unspoken sense of guilt that their grief is somehow a failure of faith.

Oliver argues that the Church's emphasis on resurrection hope, while theologically true, has sometimes been deployed in ways that short-circuit the grieving process rather than honouring it. The instinct to move quickly to comfort, to remind the bereaved that their loved one is 'in a better place', can inadvertently communicate that grief itself is inappropriate — that a person of genuine faith should not be this sad.

But the Psalms are full of lament. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus — not because he had forgotten that resurrection was coming, but because grief is a real and honourable response to loss. The shortest verse in the Bible is not a throwaway detail; it is a theological statement about what it means to be human and to love.

Oliver's call is not for the Church to abandon hope, but to create space for grief alongside it. To preach on loss. To train pastoral teams in bereavement care. To make it safe for people to say, in church, that they are not okay — and to be met with presence rather than platitudes. It is a call the whole Church would do well to hear.