The Meadow Hills Baptist Church in Aurora, Colorado, provides an exception to the suspicion of the Christian year that generally prevails among independent Baptist churches. This congregation has found the practice of the Christian year to be a powerful means of deepening evangelical faith.
Most evangelical Baptist churches have little contact with the Christian year except on the Sunday before Christmas and Easter Sunday. Occasionally one can find a Good Friday service. Many parishioners feel that observance of the Christian year would distract from or even work against the primary mission of the church, which is to implement the Great Commission—making disciples from all nations and baptizing them. Widespread lack of knowledge about most of the themes of the Christian year is combined with a suspicion that those Christians who practice such “non-biblical” activities do so as a dry, unfulfilling ritual, which seems completely irrelevant in our age of spiritual freedom, freshness, and spontaneity from the Holy Spirit. Denominational publishing houses mirror these positions and provide no instruction, not even historical information, on the subject of the Christian year.
Discovery of the Christian Year
This author’s Baptist church is a rare exception to the above profile. Drawing from instructive, if limited exposure to liturgical environments and considerable study of church history and Christian symbols, we have begun to learn the value of periodically focusing on all the major themes of our Christian faith. Our celebration of the Christmas season has expanded to encompass Advent and Epiphany as well as Christmas. And along with Easter, we now observe Lent and Pentecost. After using the Christian year as a primary basis of our worship for five years, our congregation would have it no other way. Such observance gives us a sense of the recurring celebration, anticipation, and challenge to all that our Lord has designed us to be.
Advent is anticipated months before it arrives. We celebrate not only the promise of Jesus’ coming as a baby in the manger, but we also rejoice in the anticipation of his second coming. During Advent, we sing primarily carols that invite or promise Jesus’ coming to be in our midst. Most Christmas carols are not sung before Christmas Eve. We then sing them for several weeks until Epiphany. As we celebrate the wise men giving gifts to our Lord, we also celebrate the many gifts that God gives to us, including spiritual gifts. In the Lenten season, we rediscover the uniqueness of our Christian faith, God’s plan for our redemption, the sacrifice of God’s Son, Jesus, on the cross. This gives us the opportunity to sing many hymns about the cross and to examine prayerfully all that we are doing both in and outside the church. During Holy Week we read aloud the Scriptures concerning Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion, and sometimes we reenact these scenes in a simple fashion. Reliving these events in Jesus’ ministry each year brings a fresh appreciation of his great love and sacrifice for us and challenges us to enthusiastic obedience. After the culmination of Holy Week on Easter Sunday, the focus on Christ’s resurrection continues several weeks. We then turn attention to God’s great gift of the Holy Spirit displayed at Pentecost.
Walking through each of these main events in the experience of Jesus provides an endless list of praise themes, sermon topics, and texts. There is no difficulty even connecting the Christian year with many topical series of sermons.
Worship Deepened
Initially, this change from the previous ritual of three hymns, offering, special music, and sermon to themes from the Christian year met with some resistance. However, such resistance was generally from those who had a strong resistance to many types of changes, rather than from those who had previously chosen to leave a liturgical environment. The former Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians who have become a part of our congregation have in many cases experienced new meaning in their worship life by bringing their evangelical faith to the observance of the Christian year. Those who have their first taste of the Christian year in our congregation often find a sense of stability and continuity in their Christian faith and worship.
Our structure of prayers, confessions, singing (even chanting) of the Psalms, connected by the focus of the Christian year gives just enough structure to our worship to enable each person to offer praise and adoration to our Lord. This pattern provides an opportunity for pastoral guidance toward effective worship not afforded by the traditional preaching service. We believe God has richly blessed us in our discovery of the Christian year.