Congregational Churches

Worship and Sacred Actions Throughout the Year in Congregational Churches

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Many of the Congregational churches not part of the United Church of Christ follow a Christian year designed to involve the worshiper with the entire message of Scripture, from Creation to eschatological fulfillment.

The Congregational churches were gathered in a protest against a church calendar cluttered with saint’s days and “holy” days. Only later, after about 1860 in North America, did Congregationalists begin to observe Christmas, Easter, and other traditional festivals and seasons. In 1919, the Commission on Evangelism and Devotional Life recommended “devotional services in every church conducted by the pastor during Holy Week with union Good Friday services wherever possible.”

Subsequent publications in British and American Congregationalism offered lectionaries and orders of worship for observances of the Christian year. Notable among these was A Book of Worship for Free Churches, published in 1948 under the General Council of the Congregational Churches in the United States. It included an introductory essay on “Symbolism in Worship.”

Structure for the Whole Message

These publications elicited an ongoing discussion about the role of the traditional Christian year in Congregational worship. It was clear that the restoration of the liturgical year was needed as a way to present a full cycle of God’s self-revelation in Scripture. What Congregationalists sought in reconstructing the Christian year was not quarrying from diverse usages of the past, but a structure through which the whole message of the Bible might speak to the whole of life—personal and social, nurturing diverse moods and needs. For Congregationalists, the Scriptures are the substance of the Christian year.

The Congregational Worshipbook, now in its fifth edition, may be taken as representative of much current practice in continuing Congregational churches (those not absorbed into the United Church of Christ). In addition to a lectionary, it provides resources for a variety of acts of Christian worship. The focus is on Sunday as the Lord’s Day, the weekly celebration of the Resurrection. As in the ancient practice of the Eastern churches, all seasons begin on Sunday. The Christian year is structured as follows:

  • Creation (September): World Communion (first Sunday in October)
  • Providence (October–November): Thanksgiving Day
  • Incarnation/Advent (November–December): Christmas
  • Proclamation (January): Epiphany
  • Presentation (February): Covenant Renewal, Baptism (forty days after Christmas)
  • Preparation/Lent (February–April): Palm Sunday
  • The Great Week: Easter
  • Fellowship (April–May): Pentecost
  • Personal Witness (June): Dedication to Holy Living
  • World Mission (July–August): Commissioning of Christian Workers
  • Fulfillment (August): Celebration of All Saints

The five-year cycle of Scripture readings in the Congregational Worshipbook had been in use, with revisions, for fifty years. It grew out of the conviction that all of the New Testament and much of the Old must be read in public worship or else languish in unopened Bibles. The Scripture reading deserves to be heard for its own messages, not just as a springboard to a sermon.

Significance of the Seasons

The Christian year in Congregational Worshipbook, conforming to the biblical order begins with the season of Creation. The season’s festival is World Communion Sunday. Harvest Home, or Providence, follows, cresting at Thanksgiving.

Incarnation (Advent) rehearses God’s varied attempts to restore sinful humanity to himself through nature, law, mighty acts, prophets, apocalyptists, and finally in a Son. Epiphany, January 6, begins the season of Proclamation, manifesting Jesus as the Light of the world. Many congregational churches have their annual meetings in January; the real business of such meetings is not the review of financial or procedure minutiae but the effort to make the local church more effective in proclaiming the gospel. Epiphany is a summons to dedicate ourselves and our churches as witnesses to the joy, wonder, and purposes of Jesus Christ. Forty days after Christmas, the ancient churches celebrated the Presentation of Jesus in the temple, where he was hailed as the light to the Gentiles and the glory of Israel. Baptisms often occur during this season.

Preparation, or Lent, looks ahead to the Great Week. This season focuses on the life, ministry, teachings, and way of salvation in Jesus. The ancient Jerusalem church observed a preparation of forty days, a number occurring frequently in the Bible. This we learn from the testimony of Egeria, a Christian woman from western Europe who visited Jerusalem and other Eastern Christian centers in the years 381–384 and left a record of the daily services of the Great Week, when the Lord’s Supper takes place. The Transfiguration of Christ is the gateway to Lent, the drama of the life and teaching of Jesus is the substance thereof, and the culmination comes in the triumph of Palm Sunday.

The Great Week continues the drama of Christ in the cleansing of the temple, the searing truth of his pointed teaching, the solemnity and wonder of the Last Supper in the Upper Room, the terror and mystery of the cross, and the transcendent splendor of the Resurrection.

The Saturday before Easter was recommended as a time for baptism in the ancient church (Cyril of Jerusalem, Lectures). In the approximation of this practice, Congregational Worshipbook incorporates baptism of adults on Palm Sunday and of children on Easter afternoon.

Easter is followed by the season of Fellowship—a time of anticipation, of close companionship, and common concern. The Scriptures count forty days to Christ’s ascension and fifty to Pentecost, which finds the disciples “all together in one place” (Acts 2:1) as the Holy Spirit comes upon them with power to witness. The gift of the Spirit thus calls forth Personal Witness to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the followers of Jesus are transformed into evangelists, eager to tell what God has done for them in Christ. Following the biblical precedent, new members are enlisted and baptisms are frequent during this season.

Personal witness leads to World Mission. Those who have received God’s blessings yearn to share them with others, both spiritually and materially. Commissioning of Christian workers—missionaries, public servants, authors, educators—is an appropriate act of this season, fulfilling Christ’s mandate of Matthew 28:19.

The scriptural imperative of the world mission carries with it the promise of future Fulfillment, as believers anticipate the glorious eternal life with the Father of our spirits. Thanksgiving for all saintly souls fittingly crowns this season and the entire Christian year. This practice follows the example of the ancient Eastern churches by giving appropriate attention to the celebration of life “in Christ”—a life that begins here but continues hereafter. In the season of Fulfillment, we look to the saints (in the New Testament meaning of the word) of the past and also to the saints of our own gathered church. To remember the great, good, and holy in our own household of faith is to be surrounded by a cloud of witnesses whose faith and example help us to place our own trust in God for fulfillment.

The Arts in Congregational Churches

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Congregational meetinghouses of the traditional kind express the early character of Congregationalism, especially in the central location of the pulpit. Subsequent renovations have attempted to embody a variety of theological commitments. Careful consideration has also been given to the appointments of Congregationalist meetinghouses. Also, several Congregationalist artists have been at the forefront of the liturgical dance movement.

The Meetinghouse

Congregational church art and architecture focus on the character and appointments of the meetinghouse. The theological statement of a meetinghouse is that followers of Jesus Christ gather to meet with each other and with God. A meetinghouse is not a church; a church is a body of Christ’s followers who have voluntarily covenanted with God and with one another and have gathered in a community for Scripture reading and exposition, prayer, praise, preaching, Christian nurture, and service. The design of meetinghouses is directed toward the end of fostering these functions of the community of believers.

Historical Background. Early American meetinghouses were simple, and decoration or embellishment was minimal. The arts, it was felt, needed to be checked because they were so easily turned to the service of idolatry. The meetinghouses and their appointments, however, were not devoid of symbolism. The Old South Meetinghouse in Boston (1720) has a 180-foot wooden steeple, often alluded to as a “finger of God,” surmounted by a weathercock, an emblem of the sovereignty of God (Federal Writers Project, Massachusetts [Boston, 1939], 155f.). More overt figurative symbols, banished from the interior of meetinghouses, often flourished just outside the doors in the burial ground. Sculptors such as Nathaniel Fuller turned their imaginations loose on gravestones, depicting skulls, faces, heads, and hearts embellished with wings, geometric patterns, doves, sunbursts, hourglasses, acorns, and inscriptions (Peter Benes, The Masks of Orthodoxy [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977], 21ff.).

By the time of American independence, a body of principles guiding the construction of meetinghouses had grown up. In witness to the character of worship, architect and carpenter Asher Benjamin published in 1797 The American Builder’s Companion, in which he suggested proper uses for classical forms such as the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite orders (reprint, New York: Dover Books, 1969, 34–37). Successive editions of the Builder’s Companion were used in the construction of hundreds of meetinghouses.

From about 1870 to 1930 gothic architecture and elaborate orders of worship appeared, signaling a new openness to traditional “catholic” elements of worship and ecclesiastical art. Representative examples are Mount Holyoke College Chapel in brownstone, First Congregational Church of Kalamazoo in brick, and the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles in cement.

The twentieth century produced new plans for meetinghouses and building complexes. Colonial Church of Minneapolis erected a group of buildings replicating a colonial New England village green (c. 1970). Oneonta Congregational Church in South Pasadena created seven buildings grouped around a central lawn and gardens, designed in accord with the themes of faith, freedom, and fellowship (Henry David Gray, Guide Book to the Oneonta Congregational Church Buildings [South Pasadena, Calif., 1950]).

Reconstruction is a centuries-old habit in Congregational meetinghouses. Difficult decisions, both historical and theological, are required, however, in the process of renovating or adding to existing structures. In 1873, for example, the 1827 interior of Second Church in Hartford was virtually made over with new windows, platform, pulpit, pews, and wood paneling in a style which might be called Victorian. “The great window behind the pulpit,” says the church’s historian, “was walled up and inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer, the creed, and other suitable texts” (E. P. Parker, History of Second Church in Hartford [Hartford: Belknap and Warfield, 1892]). In 1920, the 250th anniversary of its gathering, Hartford’s South Church recreated the original interior and added an enormous chandelier suspended from the 1873 domed, pantheon-like ceiling. Pews were moved to provide for doorways and space for choirs, drama, and sacred dance.

Typically nineteenth and twentieth-century Congregational churches have added facilities to serve many needs, opening a special opportunity to revisit earlier years, learn from them, and seek to reconstruct or to add functions while retaining the architectural and spiritual intent of the meetinghouse. Reconstructions usually demand a central theme, and a favorite among American Congregationalists has been the freedom to worship, one of the themes of the Oneonta Meetinghouse in Pasadena.

Furnishings and Symbolism. Although the central symbols of congregational worship have remained constant—Bible, pulpit, and Table—the quantity and variety of symbolic artworks have increased greatly over the last century and a half. The open Bible on the central pulpit or table proclaims the right and duty of every member to read and interpret the Scriptures. Harvard and Yale’s colleges were established to provide educated ministers for the church, and members were also expected to know how to think.

In eighteenth-century meetinghouses, the pew arrangement was lengthwise around the pulpit and Table, as in the Old South Meetinghouse in Boston (1729). Old South pews were family-oriented, square, and elevated, with children facing their parents and with foot warmers provided for relief from winter cold (Henry David Gray, Old South Congregational Church [Hartford, 1970]). In the nineteenth century, the pews crossed the narrow width. The pulpit and table were raised at one end of the building with the chief entrance doors at the other. This rearrangement mirrored a change from family-gathered-round-the-pulpit to audience-chamber whose occupants were to observe a civic/religious duty and voluntary attendance.

Old meetinghouses used plain glass or later cathedral glass (frosted clear glass). One of the earliest Congregational churches to use stained glass was Center Church, Hartford, whose memorial windows depicted scriptural and symbolic figures (Rockwell Harmon Potter, Hartford’s First Church [Hartford, 1932]). Asylum Hill Congregational Church provided a rationale for memorial windows in its Systematic Plan for Memorial Windows, 1913 (L. B. Paton and E. K. Mitchell [Hartford, 1939]). In some churches the original window on the east wall behind the pulpit was bricked up, covered with drapes, or replaced with the tablets of the law.

In pre-1950 meetinghouses, the pulpit was elaborately crafted with motifs from the classical orders and biblical inscriptions relating to the Word of God and featured beautifully wrought spiral stairs. The Communion table in a Congregational church is a true table and not a high altar set apart from the people. Set out from the east wall with the minister behind it and the deacons encircling its sides, it invites and includes the people. One of the chalices of the Old South Church in Boston is dated 1607, the oldest Communion cup in use in America; another is the famous chalice made by Paul Revere (Frederick M. Meek, Brief History and Guide [Boston: Old South Church, n.d.]). Baptismal fonts vary in form from standard circular or octagonal fonts located near entrances to silver vessels held by deacons.

Clothwork has reentered the meetinghouses as weavers and embroiderers have contributed tapestries, pulpit panels, and cushion covers. A beautiful and functional crewel tapestry designed by Pauline Baynes and created by church women adorns Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis and improves acoustics. It depicts “the story of congregationalism and its contribution to American history” (Howard Conn, A Hand Always Above My Shoulder [Edina, Minn.: Aberfoyle Press, n.d.], 17).

Dramatic Arts in Worship

The Congregational churches have also been active in incorporating dramatic arts and dance in worship. The beginnings of these practices can be traced to the solemn processions of the Pilgrims into the meetinghouse at Plymouth colony (described in Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, ed. by Sydney V. James, Jr. [Plymouth: Plymouth Plantation, 1963], 76-77). Pioneers in liturgical dance include Ted Shawn; the First Congregational Church, Berkeley; Margaret Palmer Fisk, who inaugurated dance choirs at Dartmouth Congregational Church, Hanover, N.H., from 1938 to 1950; and Helen L. Gray, Ruth St. Denis, and Jerry Green of Oneonta Congregational Church. By 1991 the Sacred Dance Guild, founded in Boston in 1958, had enrolled 770 members in North America. A plethora of books offer manuals, scripts, diagrams, directions, and rationales (see Margaret Fisk Taylor, A Time to Dance, revised ed. [Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1981]; Christena L. Schlundt, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn [New York: New York Public Library, 1950]; Helen L. Gray, As We Pray Together [Los Angeles: Oneonta Congregational Church, 1952]).

The inherent freedom of Congregational churches has encouraged the presentation of Christian faith in choral speech, liturgy with acolytes, crucifer and lay readers, dramas, passion plays, and music. No “authority” is permitted to crib or confine each church’s freedom to express the gospel of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in ways of its own choosing.