The Church Year and the Great Tradition

Our Spiritual Formation

The Church Year is a classic framework employed by millions of Christians worldwide to focus on the life of Christ in real time. As an complimentary alternative to the civil calendar, the Church calendar has served to help congregations remember and be transformed by the major events of Jesus’ life.

Linking our worship, devotion, instruction, and practice to the cycle of the Christian year provides a wealth of benefits to the spiritual journey of individuals, families, and congregations. To begin with, it enables us to “track with” the thoughts and sermons of tens of thousands of other congregations who share in reflecting on Jesus’ life and work through the Christian year. Furthermore, it helps us avoid scattered and arbitrary emphases since we link our reading and services to the horizon of texts provided by the Revised Common Lectionary. It opens us up to the vast devotional, sermonic, and teaching resources available keyed to the Christian year. In addition, you will be drawn into closer fellowship with the ancient tradition of the earliest Christians, who focused so joyfully on the victorious work of Christ as the destroyer of evil and restorer of creation. Above all, with its focus on the story of Christ and his working in the Church, your Christian year reflection will bring you back to the Storyline that lies at the foundation of the Church’s worship and mission–the story of Jesus. The Christian year can enable you to walk to his beat with a new rhythm, a beat whose pulse pounds counter to those rhythms thumping so loudly in civil calendars and in secular society.

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