The Church Calendar: From Scripture to Church History (Part 1)

There is a very human desire to participate in seasons and commemorate important events. It is important to follow the Reformed instinct and seek an answer from the Scriptures, to discover if the historical church calendar has a foundation in the Scriptures or if it solely grew out of church tradition.

One of the earliest memories I have from attending church as a child was an Ash Wednesday service, where our Lutheran pastor drew a small cross with ash on my forehead. What stood out to me the most was that the structure of the service was different, as were the colors hanging in the sanctuary. Together, this signaled a change in what was happening at church.

This change I witnessed was a seasonal shift in the church calendar, which can also be known as the liturgical or ecclesiastical calendar. Almost all Christian churches today —Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant—follow a version of the church calendar. 

What Is the Church Calendar?

The church calendar is an annual rhythm of special days and seasons that relate to the history and message of salvation as taught in the Scriptures. Some traditions with a “low” church culture—like various Baptist, nondenominational, or charismatic churches—often will only celebrate Christmas and Easter. Other “high” church cultures will not only observe those two dates but entire seasons around the birth of Christ (Advent) and leading up to Easter (Lent), as well as multiple other holy days throughout the year. Church traditions that follow a liturgical calendar in more detail are typically Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and some Reformed denominations.

Why Is the Church Calendar Not Followed in Some Traditions?

Within our Protestant tradition, the church calendar can be deemphasized, and this is a direct result of the Puritans’ strong aversion to the church calendar. Following the Reformation, the Puritans sought to emphasize the Scriptures and move the church away from all of the traditions that had grown in Rome. The Puritans, in zealously rejecting anything that was “Romish,” completely did away with all of the feast days, seasons, and pageantry throughout the year in an effort to teach that the entire year was sacred. And yet, having a church calendar was inevitable, even for the Puritans, who perhaps more so than any other church tradition elevated the Lord’s Day (Sunday) to a place of maximum reverence.

Perhaps an unintended consequence of doing away with the church calendar was that this created a cultural vacuum that separated civic and church culture, providing a framework for a culture that was once Christian to divorce itself from its religious moorings and drift away into secularism. Instead of the church, it was the national government that began to provide a calendar of holidays and festivals. Here in the U.S., we see this around holidays that have no religious meaning, like Memorial Day, Labor Day, and the Fourth of July. Formerly religious holidays like Christmas are pluralized in such a way that any religious or secular tradition can find meaning in the “holiday season”—such that the true meaning of Christmas in the West is largely diluted. 

As we build our lives weekly, seasonally, and annually around the events of the life of Christ and the story of the Bible, we remind ourselves who we are and what story we are living in.

This all illustrates the human desire to participate in seasons and commemorate important events. And it begs the question, “Is such participation good?” Here, it is important to follow the Reformed instinct and seek an answer from the Scriptures, to discover if the historical church calendar has a foundation in the Scriptures or if it solely grew out of church tradition. 

A Liturgical Calendar in the Scriptures

The earliest example scripturally where you can find God instructing his people to follow a calendar is taken from Genesis 2:3:

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. 

God the Father worked into the fabric of creation a pattern for rest that his people were to observe. Later, during the time of Moses, God formalized this as one of the Ten Commandments:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)

During the Old Testament, the calendar does not merely pertain to the Sabbath. There are a number of other annual feasts that ancient Israel observed throughout the year that observed both Sabbath principles and pointed to the mighty works of God and anticipated the work of the coming Messiah.

Passover is the most familiar of these feasts, commemorating the redemption of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. This was observed annually on 14th Nisan (March/April), where faithful Jews would slay and eat a lamb or kid as a sacrifice, remembering Israel’s deliverance from death.

There were a number of other seasons and festivals as well. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was a weeklong feast leading up to Passover, wherein the eating of bread with yeast (symbolizing sin) was forbidden. The Feast of Firstfruits soon after Passover recognized the provision of God’s bounty in the promised land. The Festival of Weeks or Pentecost was the final feast of remembrance, which recalled the giving of the Law at Sinai. Throughout other seasons of the year, there was the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Day of Atonement, which all looked forward to the coming Messiah.

In addition to these annual rhythms, ancient Israel would practice a Sabbath year every seven years, where they would allow the land to be at rest. Further, every fiftieth year, ancient Israel was called to have a Year of Jubilee, where captives were to be liberated, debts forgiven, and land returned to its original owners.

All of these feasts looked forward to the ministry of Jesus Christ and were fulfilled in his ministry and in the early ministry of the apostles.

There is a clear precedent in the Scriptures for a liturgical calendar, and this precedent continued in the history of the early church.

The Historical Argument

From the New Testament to the early church fathers, it is indisputable that the church commemorated the resurrection of Jesus by worshiping him on Sunday, the day of his resurrection, instead of the historical Jewish Sabbath on Saturday. In the writings of Melito (d. 180), John Chrysostom (c. 349 - 407), Irenaeus (130 - 202), Eusebius (260 - 339), and Jerome (c. 347 - 420), it is clear that the early church celebrated Easter to mark the resurrection of Jesus, Christmas and Epiphany to celebrate Christ’s birth, Ascension Sunday, and Pentecost. Furthermore, the church father Augustine (395 - 430) had a collection of sermons that included a series on the liturgical year. The early church sought to continue the tradition of remembering the works of God’s grace to his people throughout the year.

This simple church calendar grew exceedingly complicated in both the Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches during the Middle Ages. Many holy days were added to the church calendar, in addition to the earlier dates of remembrance of Jesus’s ministry. It is important to note that many of the new “holy days” throughout the year were not commemorating the work of Christ but the work of saints. In the medieval church, keeping these many holy days became a part of doing penance and gaining merit with God.

It was this very distortion of the Scriptures that led the Reformers of the 16th century to work to reform worship and reorient the liturgical calendar back to the Scriptures. The Reformers re-elevated the importance of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) as the primary Christian holiday of worship. This day was the center of all of the church’s worship and communal life.

The traditions that we practice as a church during these seasons and particular days create a particular culture that is set apart from the worldly culture.

And yet, the early Reformers did not throw away the entire church calendar. The Heidelberg Catechism and Synod of Dort both prescribed a church calendar that included Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. The Church of England produced a Book of Common Prayer that followed even more of the liturgical calendar and yet dropped many of the Catholic emphases.

While the later Puritans sought to purge the liturgical calendar from the practice of the church, the early Reformers had a different mind and saw its usefulness both in the discipleship of the church and as a matter of Christian liberty (Romans 14:15; Colossians 2:16).

Why Should We Follow the Church Calendar?

Every culture has a calendar that it follows. Human beings, by necessity of who God created us to be, make sense of our lives by marking time. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries annually by gathering together and making merry. We celebrate national holidays together. The power of religious holidays can transcend cultures, as even non-Christians will celebrate Christmas.

Peter Leithart, in addressing this cultural reality, said: 

These holidays are not simply celebrations, but they are moments for collective memory, for remembering past events of our society, for memorializing and celebrating our heroes, for remembering what it is that makes us the people that we are . . . these celebrations are acts of collective memorialization that make us the people that we are. All this is to say that human beings inevitably organize their year in some pattern or other. The choice is never between having an annual pattern or not. The choice is always which pattern we will use.

At Christ Church Bellingham, we are trying to build a distinctively Christian culture, and so while we follow the Reformed value of Sola Scriptura and hold to Scripture as our highest authority, we do not want to completely throw away the tradition of a more robust church calendar, as we believe it is a valuable tool in shaping the life of a Christian. We are convinced of the formative power of liturgy—both within a worship service and across a calendar year.

Take our weekly Sunday liturgy. Each Sunday, we are called in to worship; praise God with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; confess our sins; receive an assurance of pardon; listen to the Word of God preached; respond with professions of faith, prayer, and an offering; come to the Lord’s Table for Communion; respond once more with praise; and then receive a blessing. These liturgical movements provide stability and disciple us in the rhythms of the Christian life.

The church calendar is an extension of this weekly liturgy for the whole year. The church calendar presents the story of the gospel over the course of a year during the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and the ordinary time of the church, bookended by Trinity Sunday and Christ the King Sunday. The traditions that we practice as a church during these seasons and particular days create a particular culture that is set apart from the worldly culture—a culture that proclaims the story of a lost and hopeless people, redeemed by a God who incarnated in human history, fulfilling all of the promises of God, and went to the cross as a sacrifice, shedding his blood as the atonement for sin. And yet, the story does not end there but continues with a Savior who conquered Satan, sin, and death in his resurrection; ascended into heaven; and now rules and reigns as the King of Kings, enabling his redeemed people by the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim his kingdom and make disciples of all nations. All of these elements—the story of what we all live in—are told throughout the year in the church calendar.

The church as a whole—and individual congregations and families—should harness the calendar to reinforce their Christian identity. As we build our lives weekly, seasonally, and annually around the events of the life of Christ and the story of the Bible, we remind ourselves who we are and what story we are living in. And we have no need to reinvent the wheel; the church calendar is a time-tested way of ordering our months around the Christ event, and it also connects us to Christians all around the world who are doing the same. As Christians, we should be celebrating and rejoicing in the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, not the commercial one offered to us by the world. So, let us keep time according to the Scriptures and with the help of our Christian heritage.