Imagine the following scenario. The year is 2068. The Western Church is preparing to celebrate Easter.
In this particular year, Easter Sunday happens to coincide with the April 22 celebration of Earth Day, a holiday that has been increasing in popularity since it was first observed a hundred years before. In order to best participate in the culture in which they have been placed, many evangelical churches choose to forego their Easter celebrations and to celebrate Earth Day instead.
Not surprisingly, other evangelicals take these churches to task for replacing Easter with Earth Day.
“Why shouldn’t we?” the churches answer back. “After all, we should be looking for points of contact with our neighbors. We would seem out of touch with society if we celebrated Easter and did nothing special for Earth Day.”
“Can’t you see how you have been co-opted by the culture?” other evangelicals ask. “You’re allowing the culture to dictate your church celebrations!”
“We are never commanded to celebrate Easter,” reply the church leaders. “Paul even says to avoid legalism when choosing to celebrate one day over another.”
Now let’s rewind back 60 years to 2008. Many evangelicals who follow the traditional church calendar are in a quandary. Pentecost and Mother’s Day fall on the same date this year (May 11). While most evangelicals in the West (though not the case worldwide) have long jettisoned the celebration of Pentecost, many evangelicals outside the U.S. embrace the history of celebrating the church’s major feast days.
So what to do on Mother’s Day?
For many in the U.S., this question will seem odd. After all, most evangelical churches do not follow a specifically Christian church calendar, except for perhaps Christmas and Easter. For my father-in-law (a Romanian Baptist pastor), the answer is clear. You celebrate Pentecost and make mention of Mother’s Day as well. Of course, he, like my other Romanian friends, is still wondering why in the world we do not celebrate Pentecost here.
A few thoughts…
Every church has a calendar. Whether the church chooses to follow the traditional calendar of the Church and preach according to the readings in a lectionary does not change the fact that every church has a way of ordering time.
The question is not, Will we follow a calendar? but Whose calendar will we follow? In other words, does our church’s ordering of time follow the wisdom of the ancient church or the whims of the consumerist American culture?
Many of our churches have a list of unofficial celebrations that order our congregational time.
- New Year’s Day.
- Valentine’s Day.
- Mother’s Day.
- Father’s Day.
- Fourth of July.
- Memorial Day.
- Halloween.
- Veteran’s Day.
By rejecting the traditional church calendar, we did not reduce the number of our celebrations; we merely replaced them with the celebrations of the culture at large.
Granted, churches do well to emphasize many of these celebrations. We can benefit from using the cultural opportunity to speak to the biblical vision of motherhood and fatherhood, etc.
But we should be willing to listen to the tough questions from those outside our culture about what our church calendars represent.
Why should the consumerist culture of the United States dictate what we celebrate as a church?
Why is it that so many American churches celebrate with great fanfare the birth of their nation (July 4) without even so much as mentioning the birth of the church (Pentecost)?
Does the way we order our time shape us as the unique, called-out people of God or merely reinforce our nationalist, consumer-shaped identity?
Listening to these tough questions may make us uncomfortable. (They make me uncomfortable too. My current solution is to celebrate Pentecost with our Sunday School class and then celebrate Mother’s Day with the rest of the church.)
As evangelicals, we do well at seeking points of contact with our culture. It would be foolish to celebrate Pentecost on Mother’s Day without ever mentioning our mothers. Our goal should not be to adopt a “we’re proud to be out of touch” mentality that harms our witness.
I am sure that evangelicals will come down on different sides of the issue of ordering time. We should refrain from dogmatism on this matter. After all, the Scriptures do give us freedom in ordering our time and celebrations.
But surely we should wrestle through these decisions. To blindly go forward without giving thought to how our time is ordered is to prepare the foundation for the imaginary scenario I described earlier, where Earth Day takes over Easter. I hope I never see that day.
