All of us pattern our lives after something. All our church’s do too. For many that’s the agrarian calendar or the academic one. For your church it should be something of God’s life in the world.
I’ve argued before that there is great wisdom to be found in the church calendar. Most churches follow a bit of it, Christmas and Easter at least. Many follow more: perhaps the big four feasts (Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost) which follow the pattern of Christ’s life in the world, and the two fasts (Advent, Lent) which proceed the biggest of those feasts.
To some extent you can take this or leave it. I think the Bible is clear that the Old Testament pattern of Israel’s feasts was a good and wise thing that the Church doesn’t need to follow (Galatians 4). There is a principle here that ordering your year around a story is a good idea. The thing is you will base your calendar around something. If you look at many churches there are all sorts of ‘special’ Sundays that are either based on the life of the world around them or things they’ve made up themselves. That could be good or bad depending on the specifics, but it is a calendar that’s being followed. Everyone except the strictest Presbyterians who don’t celebrate Christmas follows a calendar in their church; well, they do too but it’s a 7-day cycle with the Sabbath every Sunday.
If you’re going to follow a calendar, and you are, I think you have to first consider the wisdom of the calendar that the tradition has handed to us. There’s no pressure to follow it, but where is it wise and how can that help us? Whatever calendar you choose—and most of these choices are unconscious ones—will disciple your people into a particular story. Why not use Jesus’ story as the frame for your year, in at least outline?
I’ve argued all this before and I think it’s true, but in the typical charismatic church it sounds a bit like gobbledegook. We get Christmas and Easter and we all like Advent calendars, but what do you even do with the others? We can imagine an occasional total fast for Lent, but every year? The average Charismatic is deeply shocked to discover that ‘not eating meat and alcohol except on Sunday’ counts as fasting, by the by. When even is Ascension?
If you started saying we should change the tablecloth on the communion table to match the seasonal colours, you are slightly missing the point. This typical church probably doesn’t have a table, definitely doesn’t have a tablecloth, and is getting it all out of storage each week to set up in a school anyway. The colours seem like frippery; which they probably are. My point is that we should find the wisdom of the calendar.
I’ve been thinking about how to get this in a way which wouldn’t be out of place in the typical church in my circles in the UK. My best suggestion is this: start with your preaching calendar.
Lots of people have an advent preaching series every year anyway. It helpfully means we ‘remember’ to preach the incarnation, that Jesus is the expectation of the Old Testament, and how as Christians we ‘wait.’
Some do the same for Lent, focusing on the cross, or on themes of lament, or themes of repentance. Most Churches preach Easter at Easter and maybe the Triumphal entry on Palm Sunday each year anyway.
Even if we just do that, we’re allowing our year to be shaped by the calendar and trying to lean into its wisdom in how we plan which passages we will preach from. I think this is a good idea. You can go further and single out Pentecost, for either preaching on receiving the Spirit or the global reach of Jesus’ mission, or the Church as made up of many nations made into one holy nation (1 Peter 2). Perhaps you could even include Ascension for preaching on the significance of the Ascension, or Jesus as our High Priest, or on prayer.
Most of those who plan preaching series will have some idea of a list of things that need to be preached on regularly, whether that’s annually or every few years. One of the ways the calendar can help us is by prompting us to do so every year for particular themes we might neglect otherwise. I think that, especially for charismatics who can tend to the triumphal, the ‘fast’ period can be helpful to us in bringing different themes to the front and centre.
You can shape the rest of your year around these building blocks then, if you wish to. This will lead to shorter preaching series I think, but personally I’m not convinced that you need a preaching series that stretches more than three months. You’re not Martyn Lloyd Jones and you don’t need to spend twelve years in Romans. Even then, Lloyd-Jones preached them on Fridays, which is a different sort of thing to what you’re doing on a Sunday morning.
I hope this is a helpful suggestion for a preacher, I appreciate for a listener there isn’t more more advice here than ‘lean into time.’
How else could we use the wisdom of the calendar to our benefit?
Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash
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