Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 08:2 (Spring 1991)
Article: Christian Education and the Church Year
Author: Kathy Ritchie Toole

FM 8:2 (Spring 1991) p. 30

Christian Education and the Church Year

Kathy Ritchie Toole

Co-Minister of Music and Education
University Baptist Church, College Park, Maryland

The prologue to the gospel of John profoundly expresses the mystery of God’s incarnation through Christ Jesus. In Christ we find our life. The life of Christ illumines our way.

Through the centuries Christians have sought to follow that light by patterning their religious experience on the life and teaching of Christ. For a large part of the Christian community this has occurred through a cyclical engagement in the events in and surrounding Jesus’ life known interchangeably as the Church Year, Christian Year, or Liturgical Year. The six seasons of the church year which revolve around the two major cycles of Christmas (Advent, Christmas, and the season after Epiphany) and Easter (Lent, Easter, and the season after Pentecost) provide a rhythm for drawing us into the life of Christ. As we return year after year and as we bring with us our own experiences—our own wanderings—-Jesus’ story becomes our story.

The Greek word anamnesis associated with the celebration of the Eucharist, is descriptive of the nature of participation as the church recalls the life of Christ. This engagement in the life of Christ surpasses merely re-enacting the events in the life of Jesus. The past becomes present.

Anamnesis is a way of bringing both the Christian community’s experience of God in the past and God’s promised future into our present experience through memory, imagination, and meaning .... Memory enables us to remember and recall a story; imagination enables us to relive it, make it new again; and meaning interprets and applies it to our actions.1

Anamnesis contributes to a powerful sense of connectedness with the players in the biblical story. The timelessness of God is made real as these biblical stories transcend the events they tell and reach into the realities of life today.

Baptists historically have rejected participation in the church year. During the period of the Reformation, the church year came under censure because of accretions and fanciful elaboration which displaced the observance of and emphasis on the Lord’s Day. The growing emphasis of the Enlightenment on rationalism,2 the suspicion held by reformers of all outward forms, the rejection of anything not explicitly condoned by Scripture, and the focus on the sins of the individual with its accompanying emphasis on the atoning death of Jesus on the cross rather than the whole life and work of Christ, all contributed to the repudiation of the church year.<...