Celebrating the Christian Year
Part of a worship lifestyle
Feature: By Tracy Ainsworth
As we seek to develop lives of worship lived to God’s glory, one tool that we may find helpful is the celebration of the Christian Year. While not traditionally part of our Advent Christian heritage, this practice can help us to create a Christian culture, structure our pilgrimage and solidify our understanding of the Faith.
In 1977, a group of predominately Advent Christian teenagers posed together in the hot, sandy lot in India as we began to build a church. It was our first day of work, and we were holding a sign that said, “July 4, 1977.” We were all from the United States, and the Fourth of July was a holiday for us. The Indian people looked at our sign rather curiously as they went by. It was just another day to them.
We needed the sign to express that we knew who we were. We were supposed to be shooting firecrackers, eating barbecue, watching parades or doing something to celebrate our heritage as a nation. Instead, we were preparing to dig up a piece of ground in a foreign land where our celebration was meaningless. I still remember the odd feeling of that ignored holiday.
The events a nation celebrates, its customs, help define it. Families also have customs that create their own culture. This is a natural part of being human, an innate desire for rootedness. I believe God put this desire for belonging into us to cause us to long for him. Just as nations and families both celebrate their culture and let it define them, so should the church. We are a different people, a different culture. We are the people of the Cross, the Redeemed, the family of the King. We are called out of every other culture to become a people. Being Christian should become our primary identity. I should be Christian before I am a woman, before I am Anglo-Saxon, before I am American, even before I am an Ainsworth.
Benefits of observing the Christian calendar
It solidifies who we are as a people.
One way that we can demonstrate this is by celebrating those events that are part of our Christian heritage. We can share a special meal and sing special songs. We can also have special celebrations that help solidify who we are as a people. In the church year, all of the holidays are based on events in the life of Christ. I have found it very helpful to celebrate these. It has given more direction and meaning to my spiritual journey and provided more ways to identify myself as Christian.
It draws us together and opens our eyes.
Celebrating the Christian year helps us to recognize time as a place of worship and to proclaim God’s acts within it. It opens our spiritual eyes to encounter him throughout our year. It also helps to join us as a culture, to draw us together as his people by our common celebration. It can help people in the church find their primary identity in Christ, and it provides a framework through which we can pass down our faith to the next generation.
It brings structure to the Christian walk.
One of the greatest benefits I have derived from celebrating the Christian year is a structure to my Christian walk. As we struggle in time, many of us live lives that are out of balance. We fight to fill the boxes of our calendars with the right mix of work, play, exercise, family, worship and other important things. Often rest is not a part of the mix. We come to worship, believing that we are to celebrate, yet often feeling lost in the frenzy of our lives. We experience guilt that we don’t feel celebratory enough, when the truth is that we haven’t slowed down enough to remember what we have to celebrate. We may have spiritual deficits, unconfessed sins of omission or commission that prevent us from enjoying our faith. We can even be so caught up in doing work for Jesus that we forget to take time to look at and experience him.
It brings balance to our lives.
Following the Christian calendar can help to strengthen our faith as we meet God in all the seasons of our lives and find him relevant to our needs. The Christian calendar provides a structure which we can use to help us balance our lives. It provides for seasons of contemplation and repentance, for spiritual housecleaning. It provides for seasons of rejoicing. It provides seasons of encouragement and challenge. And it provides seasons of rest.
God understands how we learn. He created us as beings with five senses. He understands better than we do how our memories can be accessed and triggered.
Celebrating the Christian year brings opportunity for multisensory learning.
Doing increases learning.
Celebrating the Christian year is a wonderful way to minister to those with different learning modalities in the church. Studies show we remember 30% of what we hear and 90% of what we see, hear, say and do (1). 1 Much of what we have done in the Free Church tradition has involved sitting and listening. Sometimes a visual aid may be used, but not often. We do sing songs, and often these are the things we remember the most.
Visual artists can participate in worship.
Celebrating the Christian year provides many opportunities for multisensory learning and expression of worship. Artists can create banners and other materials that can be used in worship. These can provide dramatic visual impact on worshipers, and there are many other opportunities for people to be active participants in the worship service.
Baptism and Communion help us worship through the senses.
God understands how we learn. He created us as beings with five senses. He understands better than we do how our memories can be accessed and triggered. He gave us his Word to hear and to read. He has also given us the powerful visual of creation to tell us of his glory (2). Baptism and Communion, the two primary symbols of our faith, are whole body experiences.
In baptism, we hear the words spoken by the pastor. We respond with a pledge of faith. We feel the hands of the pastor pushing us down into the symbolic death we die with our Lord. We are immersed in water that is actually wet, which gets into our ears and eyes. We are pulled back up into the resurrection of our new life with Christ. We can see the joy in the eyes of our loved ones who have come to witness this event. It is a moment we can remember clearly, not just because it was an important one, but because we were wholly engaged in it.
When Jesus told us to remember him, he gave us the symbol of Communion. He could have chosen to give us a verse to remember or a song to sing. Instead he gave us bread and wine. He gave us a symbol we could see, touch, feel and taste, and words of institution for us to hear.
As Christians, let's create opportunities for worship for all people.
As Advent Christians who believe that God is redeeming whole people, not just souls, we need to create opportunities for everyone in our congregations to give offerings of worship, not just for those who can sing or teach or speak. The celebration of the Christian year can help us to give those opportunities to everyone, to the singers, the readers, the speakers, the artists, the cooks and those who serve. It’s not the only way to provide these opportunities, but it is a very good one.
My church celebrates the Christian year. Through it we have discovered a greater involvement amongst our young people, an increased depth of faith in all of our worshipers and an increased sense of our mission as a church. As we celebrate these days with the people of God around the world and through the ages, it helps to create us into a culture. Just as it felt odd to be an American in a place where there was no Fourth of July holiday, so it now feels very important to me to remember the days of the church year as they mark the events in the story that is the story of my salvation, and therefore of who I am. They are part of my heritage of faith, and part of the way I use time to worship God.
1 Honey & Munford, Multisensory Learning & Intelligence. www.learning-forces.org.uk/learn/msensory, 2001
2 Psalm 19:1
Tracy Ainsworth, “Celebrating the Christian Year: Part of a worship lifestyle,” The Witness, Fall 2019