Worship and Sacred Actions Throughout the Year American Baptist Churches in the USA

American Baptist congregations are free to choose their own order of worship, and so the observance of the Christian year varies among churches. In the twentieth century, many congregations have followed an American civil calendar and have combined both religious and civil observances. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a strong movement toward the recovery of a more distinctly Christian calendar.

The American Baptist Churches in the USA (ABCUSA), like other Baptist denominations, is a voluntary association of autonomous local churches organized for mutual aid and the support of common missions and ministries. Thus, there are American Baptist churches, but no American Baptist church. In discussing events, trends, and developments among American Baptists, then, one is always constrained to remember that Baptists work together by persuasion, not legislation.

Calendars Discarded

Baptist theology and practice, particularly in worship, are rooted in Scottish and English Calvinism. Thus most early Baptists followed the Calvinists in discarding calendars of “feasts and fasts,” and in deemphasizing liturgical ceremony. This approach became so deeply entrenched that, even into the early twentieth century, some Baptists of North America declined to observe Christmas and other Christian festivals and continued to uphold the related principle that every Lord’s Day (Sunday) was just like any other. Yet, there has always been a minority who maintain that the worship book, the Christian year, and a more formal liturgy do have an authentic place among Baptists.

Discarding religious calendars created two great voids which profoundly influenced Baptist worship. Loss of a lectionary related to a religious calendar led to topical, situation-dependent sermons, resulting in some of the best—and the worst—of Protestant preaching. Loss of the calendar itself encouraged many churches to drift toward civil religion, substituting an American civil calendar for a distinctly Christian calendar.

The American Civil Calendar

The American civil calendar combines patriotic holidays such as Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days with commercially oriented celebrations such as Mother’s, Valentine’s, and Grandparents’ days. Three explicitly religious days have a prominent place for Christians—Palm Sunday, Easter, and Christmas. Thanksgiving, the American holiday, is distinctive as a civil holiday with a religious theme. All of these observances became the core calendar for many Baptist congregations. Denominational “promotions” were added to the core—fund drives for various missions and days of “recognition” such as graduation, Rally Day, Off-to-College Day, and Camps and Conferences Sunday.

Other than hymnals, American Baptists published no “official” liturgical directories or worship books for use in the pews. However, denominational publishing houses have printed pastors’ resource books produced by individual authors. One such book, by G. Edwin Osborn (1953), reflects the influence of the American civil calendar. It contains a suggested lectionary and calendar with “thirteen key dates”—six civil and six religious, along with Thanksgiving. This book, a companion to a hymnal (1953) published jointly by the American Baptists (Judson Press) and the Disciples of Christ (Bethany Press), found limited acceptance in both denominations.

Two other books published for American Baptists have also met with limited success. John Skoglund’s 1968 service book, now out of print, maintained the tradition of those Baptists who did not wholly reject the religious calendar or prayer book. Skoglund utilized liturgies and a calendar similar to those of the pre-1965 American Episcopal and Lutheran churches. He also included resources for use on civil occasions observed in churches, but these are clearly segregated from the religious calendar itself. His calendar-lectionary contains no reference to a civil observance and principally follows the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. However, the book was seldom used in the pew as a worship book. The other book, a pastor’s manual and planning resource by Orlando Tibetts (1986), is topical—rather than liturgically—arranged. It contains resources for “special days or seasons” (half from the civil calendar) but is otherwise unhelpful for the pastor-liturgist who is seriously following the Christian year.

Recovering a Christian Calendar

As a denomination, American Baptists are not classed as “liturgical,” yet many of their churches and clergy use worship orders and materials that are indistinguishable from those of their liturgical sisters and brothers. Each American Baptist congregation exercises the right to determine its own and use and practice in worship. This right includes the freedom to use or to abstain from using, any particular form or style of Christian worship—or any particular book, calendar, or lectionary.

As have other denominations since Vatican II, American Baptists are developing a new understanding of Christian worship and of liturgies ancient and modern. Unlike those denominations that have official national offices or commissions on worship, American Baptist involvement in this renewal has had to rise from the grassroots—from individual congregations and individual laity and clergy. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to form a denomination-wide interest group in liturgy from the 1950s to the 1970s. Finally, in 1989, “Liturgy & Life: the American Baptist Fellowship for Liturgical Renewal,” was organized and has begun to emerge as a responsible forum for addressing worship-related issues among American Baptists.

Since 1965, various American Baptist churches began to move away from the civil calendar. Usually, without dropping civil observances, they added some distinctly Christian holy days and times, such as Advent or Lent. Pentecost and Epiphany also began to receive attention, though it is still common for Pentecost to be overshadowed, or excluded altogether when it occurs at the same time as Mother’s Day or Memorial Day. Similarly, many parishioners, exhausted long before noon of Christmas day, have little energy or interest in extending the Nativity festival into the New Year, to Epiphany.

Though there have been positive developments in the liturgy for American Baptists, those pastors and congregations who desire to stay attuned to developments in the liturgy have had to borrow and adapt resources, calendars, and lectionaries from their brothers and sisters in other denominations and will likely continue to have to do so for some time. Yet, those American Baptists most involved in liturgical renewal are also those in dialogue with their counterparts in other denominations, seeking to cooperate rather than to compete, and to develop and to own a common understanding of Christian liturgy and time.

A denomination-wide program that includes a focus on American Baptist worship is being developed in the 1990s. It is unlikely that this program will produce any official American Baptist worship books, lectionaries, or Christian year calendars, yet there is hope that it will stimulate and intensify interest in worship and liturgy.