Scholars praise church's Christian year calendar

Christian Century, Jan 2, 2002

Many Christians don't realize it, but their New Year's Day was not Tuesday, January 1. It was Sunday, December 2, the first day of Advent. In other words, the beginning of the church year.

If pastor Ed Searcy and his United Church of Canada congregation in Vancouver could alter a long-ingrained custom, perhaps Christians throughout North America would pay as much attention to the church year as to the secular year. Searcy's congregation has created an unusual way to count off the days--"Salt of the Earth: A Christian Seasons Calendar."

Just as Jews, Muslims and Buddhists strive to follow their own spiritual calendars, Searcy's congregation wants Christians to recognize that they too are a religious minority in a dominant secular culture and could benefit from being more aware of their own liturgical seasons. "Our congregation began asking more than a year ago why we adopt the secular year. We realized creating a Christian seasons calendar was a cool idea and nobody else had ever done it," said Searcy, pastor at University Hill Congregation at the University of British Columbia.

The Salt of the Earth calendar has been endorsed by some esteemed Christian figures, including the man Time last year named "the best theologian in America," Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School. "Few things are more important for Christians today than reclaiming the calendar," Hauerwas says. "This wonderful calendar helps us do that by reminding us that we are constituted by the narrative that is quite different from Canadian or American national holidays."

Searcy says Christians need the courage to live out the Christian "narrative" of Jesus' ministry, suffering and resurrection in ways sharply distinct from secular culture. "This is not an innocent project," he said. "This is a way to build virtues by helping Christians recognize they follow a minority tradition that has values and heroes far different from the mainstream culture."

Instead of a 12-month calendar, the new calendar is organized into the seven liturgical seasons of Christianity. The four weeks of Advent make up one page of the calendar, followed by a page for the 12 days for Christmas, as well as fold-out pages for the five weeks of Epiphany, seven weeks of Lent, seven weeks of the Easter season and five months marking the time after Pentecost.

Walter Brueggemann, a noted Old Testament scholar who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, also praised the calendar: "I am so glad to see the emergence of this calendar because we Christians are in an emergency about time. It is clear that dominant culture in North America no longer knows what time it is, because every season has been homogenized into an uninterrupted `shopping season.' This new calendar refers all our seasons back to the Lord of all time and may, in quite concrete daily ways, provide a form of resistance against the timelessness of consumerism back into the timefulness of our faith." Inquiries about the calendar may be made at www.thechristiancalendar.com.

--RNS