Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

Liturgical Calendar

Christ Community on Sunday | Lent readings

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This Sunday is the first Sunday of Lent, and also happens to be the first public Sunday of Christ Community, which is what we decided to name the community we’ve been cultivating. You can check out some basic info here, but we’re still working on the "real" website behind the scenes. Somehow this icon of Jesus has ended up all over our literature (mostly because we don’t have an "official" logo yet):

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But now some of us have grown kind of attached to it – it’s an icon from St. Joseph’s Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts. Anyway, we’re meet Sunday nights at 6pm at the second floor chapel at Indiana Tech’s Andorfer Commons (map). Here’s how we’re describing ourselves:

Christ Community is gathered around liturgical rhythms; worshiping in ancient and home-grown ways to see Christ formed in us, to be a living witness of the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I hope you can come join us for worship (Sundays at 6pm, remember). We joked as a team that Lent was a really cheery season to start a church service… so it goes! We’ve all immensely enjoyed worshiping together, and we’re looking forward to making things a bit more public and seeing what comes of it.

Speaking of Lent, we are trying to find something to do as a community together (yes, a tad late). In the process of looking for some things I came across something I am planning to do myself: read through the early church fathers during Lent. The church fathers (or apostolic fathers) is the term used to designate the collection of earliest extant Christian writings outside the New Testament. They provide a fascinating glimpse into the life of Christians in the postapostolic period (A.D. 70-135), a time when the church was struggling with the transition from having capital-A Apostles around (the ones who were with Jesus) to the time after their deaths. There were questions of authority and governance, new challenges and pressures (both internal and external).

Anyway, I’m reading them as a devotional exercise, not just a historical one, which means I am wondering what the church fathers’ response to the challenges of the 1st century might have to teach us about the challenges we face as the church of Jesus Christ in the 21st century. Happy lenting!

The blessed “irrelevance” of Ash Wednesday

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Tomorrow we’re celebrating Ash Wednesday with a diverse group of people: some who have been coming to our Sunday night gatherings (which we’re calling "Christ Community" now), some who are part of Heartland, and Heartland’s senior high youth group!

One of the things I love about Ash Wednesday is how radically counter-cultural it is. You can’t even really try to make it "relevant" or cool… you’ve got ashes smeared on your forehead: you look kind of silly. Then the whole service is geared toward repentance and sorrow and mortality. I mean, where’s the fun in that? There’s really no way to "jazz it up" and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s important.

Often we talk a lot about making the Bible relevant, which is all fine and good as long as we’re talking about making the meaning of biblical texts clear to people. But too often what we end up trying to do is fit God into the story of our lives, as if He were an optional add-on that "enhances" my life or a therapeutic God who just wants to help me become a "better me". In reality, God is demanding a lot more than that. God is wanting to enfold us into His story, to make our lives "relevant" to the kingdom. So I don’t mind if the Bible seems like a strange book sometimes. I don’t mind if the themes of the liturgical calendar or the biblical text strike us as alien, because oftentimes that is simply a signal that our lives have yet to be formed into Christ’s image, into God’s story, and we need to struggle for awhile with it.

The call of Ash Wednesday, and Lent generally, is for us to turn our attention again toward God, and away from the sins that so easily steer us off course. Sometimes that feels strange and difficult. But I believe it’s part of following Christ, out of our comfortable idolatries and habitual sins, and into a new depth of life in Christ.

"Sorrow opens the door to many a blessing which indulgence usually destroys." – Thomas à Kempis

Why I link missional living with the Christian liturgical calendar

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The language might be slightly daunting for some (it’s an abstract for a seminary essay), but this post from Halden briefly outlines most of the reasons we are practicing the Christian liturgical calendar during our Sunday evening gatherings.

The point is that the way we practice time powerfully shapes us as a certain kind of people. The Christian liturgical year has historically been a powerful way of forming Christian identity and everyday practice, but this has been "largely lost in the contemporary evangelical church, the life of which has
rather become dominated and determined by the calendar of the
nation-state and market (which tell us, above all, when we must shop)." There are all kinds of liturgical calendars, and the one that most Americans (including evangelical Christians) celebrate and adhere to is the liturgical calendar of the consumer.

So while most evangelical Christians have great intentions for being missional in their everyday lives, we have to face the fact that missional people don’t just fall from trees. They have to be formed. And when our lives are formed by the rhythms of shopping, watching TV, consumption, and paying credit card bills, we find it doesn’t actually make us into missional people, those who can faithfully witness to God’s salvation in Christ. The change has to go deeper and be more radical if we are going to see the church fulfill her call to "implement the achievement of Christ" (Tom Wright’s phrase). We won’t be formed as a missional people unless we radically re-orient our lives around Christ, and away from the liturgies of consumerism.

"Through a recovery of the liturgical year, Christian churches have an
opportunity to reclaim a holistic and missionally oriented ecclesial
self-consciousness which is vital to the faithful witness of the church
in the culture of late-modern capitalism."

Amen!