Praxis Conference - Blog 2

Experiencing the First PRAXIS Conference

Blog # 2 on the Conference

The Church Calendar and Spiritual Formation

 

            Prior to the Praxis 2014 conference that I attended and am blogging about, this article about the conference appeared in the Tulsa World.  Pastor Ed Gungor, a pastor of the Sanctuary Church hosting the conference described how the Evangelical Church of our day, in many quarters is facing a sense of bankruptcy.  He specifically described the sort of bankruptcy being experienced as one in which the enterprise is facing reorganization.  Evangelicalism has large numbers of followers and numerous resources; but there is also a sense of needing corrections to move forward from the present to the needs of the future.  He believes that part of Evangelicalism’s need is to reclaim elements of the ancient church calendar.

            He described at the conference, and other speakers reiterated from their own perspectives how helpful setting forth some elements of the ancient church calendar could be in the spiritual formation of Christians in an increasingly secular age.  Pastor Gungor described in the Tulsa World article and in speaking to the conference how Evangelicalism is often producing better Americans more than better Christians.  He believes part of the problem in modern Evangelicalism is that American holidays like New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July receive more attention in many Evangelical churches than Advent, Epiphany, and Pentecost.  We end up having services geared towards remembering soldiers who have served our country while having no remembrances days for saints or notable Christians who paved the way for a robust expression of the Christian faith.

            The church calendar observed by the early church, prior to Constantine’s involvement with the church had such seasons as Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday and Easter, and Pentecost being expressed even before the New Testament canon was completely decided.  That is not to say that the Church was without the Scriptures, but only to say that a handful of books of Scripture had not been universally accepted yet as part of the Scriptures.  But the Gospel was being presented as the stories of Christ and his redemption were told in connection with a church calendar that highlighted within the ongoing lives of God’s people their connection to the things of Christ in the Advent, when the Church like the people of the Old Testament waited for Christ’s coming; or in Christmas when the babe born to Mary was in his infancy already the light and hope of the world come to redeem us from our sins.  The season of Epiphany highlighted that God made manifest who Christ truly was; so that shepherds worshipped who saw him, or he was understood to be the hope of Israel when as an infant he was brought to the temple, or how John the Baptist recognized who he was at the River Jordan.  God was manifesting that this one come in the flesh was the hope of humankind.

            The church calendar helped create a sense of how history had meaning because in history God had acted to bring redemption into our lives through the life of Christ and through God’s great and wonderful redemptive acts.  The worship of God’s people in the Old Testament had revolved around the great redemptive acts.  The seven day week was a remembrance of God’s creation of the world in six days and his resting on the seventh; whether one sees the creation as a literal six day creation or as a metaphorical six day creation.  The redemptive history of the Exodus was expressed in the Passover, while the blessing of God’s people in the land God gave them was celebrated in the festivals, perhaps especially in the Feast of the Weeks otherwise known as Pentecost.  A similar calendar emerged almost immediately in the forming years of the Ancient Church.  A yearly journey through a church calendar gives a congregation of Christians an opportunity to pause at sacred moments of observing how the world waited for Christ to come in an advent season, how Christ came as an infant to be God in the flesh at Christmas.  We pause during a season of Epiphany to contemplate how God revealed to men and women the uniqueness of Christ as seen by Simeon in the temple, by shepherds in the field, by the wise men, at the temple when he was twelve, or as he arrived one day while John the Baptist was baptizing in the Jordan.  During a season like Lent we pause to reflect upon Christ going out to the wilderness to suffer, to give up meat and drink on our behalf.  We seek to meet him in the wilderness to be emptied of ourselves and to be subsequently granted greater fullness in him.  Then we pause to celebrate his coming to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but quickly we see him prepare to face the agony of the cross, burial in a grave, but ultimately to gain the triumph of resurrection and ascension.

            The Evangelical leaders gathered at the conference did not necessarily want to keep the calendar the exact way the ancients did, or how Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglicans and Episcopalians do so today.  But what they have been learning is that there are blessings for congregations that have elements of the milestones of God’s redemptive events posted along the journey of a Christian’s life passing through a year of following Christ in their church’s worship services.  A congregation's active remembering of these milestones of God’s work of redemptive acts through a church calendar helps explain our present situations in life in accord with what God has done for us in the great redemptive acts.  It is enough for us that we live with a secular calendar in our jobs, maybe we need a calendar in our worship that marks the milestones of the acts of redemption.  Then throughout the year we will pause at the markers, the milestones, the sacred places where living water is handed out to tired men and women making their sojourns in a dry and weary land.

Whether one “follows” the Church calendar or uses it simply to highlight the great acts of redemption, the Christian plugging away at life year upon year can find so many blessings pausing along the way at the milestones of redemptive history.  These pauses along the yearly journey through a church calendar serve to form us around those redemptive acts of history even as we make our way in the course of life in our daily jobs and in our often mundane assignments in life.  The highlights of the church calendar serve to remind us that what we see of our lives, like an iceberg tell only a portion of our lives.  For in Christ we are redeemed and the milestones of his redemptive acts are meant to be understood to be also our stories into which our lives have been placed, so that as we see the milestones of Christ's redemptive work we are to write in childlike manners our names for this story, the Christ story is meant to be owned by us as our story, the story of our redemption.  A church calendar helps to create in our life the sense of how our journeys in life are always connected to Christ's journey taken for us in the glorious work of God's redemption of us.  This life of Christ expressed in the church calendar serves to bring us into the story, and then to reshape our lives around the story of redemption.  We gradually learn that our stories are part of his story and that the ancient past wherein he walked upon the earth for our redemption is the story into which we have been recruited by grace even if we live two thousand years into the future from whence he sojourned upon the earth.  It is his story marked on the pages of a church calendar that is shaping our story, directing us in time and giving us the future course of our sojourn from infancy to death, burial, and resurrection.