Scrapping V: The Real Seasons of the Church

Thoughtful comment from Randy Brant of SOTV yesterday. Here's my thought on his thought:

Whether we keep and try to tweak the RCL or conceive of something new that preaches from one end of the Bible to the other over three/four years to teach Scripture as a whole, we've got to figure out the text/context problem and connect the pulpit to the REAL seasons of our people's lives, not the artificial seasons of the church year.

TEXT/CONTEXT

If the job of the preacher, according to Barth, is to enter the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (text/context), then yes, any given Sunday's context has a LOT to do with the turkey on the table or the midnight sale at Best Buy. That's the people's world, so drawing their present reality into the sermon makes a lot of sense. Their present reality also includes school starting, going to the voting booth, piling up credit card debt, post-holiday depression, waiting for the first buds to pop out on the trees, waiting for the diagnosis, saying "goodbye" to their baby in a minivan loaded with college stuff, finding grandpa a nursing home that he won't wander out of in the middle of the night.

Whether the RCL is kept and tweaked or something new is created is not the issue. Whatever the text,  the preacher needs to connect the text to the context (which certainly does include the "season") in a real, refreshing and relevant way. And it wouldn't hurt of this week's lesson connected with last week's lesson and next weeks lesson AND the real season of the culture.

So, what are the REAL seasons of the year?

NOT ADVENT, BUT SCHOOL STARTING

For our culture, Advent doesn't start the new year. New Years may start the new year. But for anyone with kids, the School Year starts the new year. That means in my world - trying to help churches help families help kids, the church year starts the Sunday after Labor Day.

Today.

(I'm at First Presbyterian in Fort Dodge  helping them start the REAL church year today with a heavy dose of parental committment)

THE REAL SEASONS

After the REAL start of the year, there is the season of brats and beer (what we call Football).

This is followed by the season of shopping and cheer (what we call Advent).

Followed by the season of debt and drear (post-holiday depression, credit-card debt, seasonal affect disorder brought on by dark and cold - what we in Minnesota call winter).

Then there's the season of "I can't wait until summer is here!" (That's a long one in my house.)

And a season of budding trees and buzzing bees and expectancies.

And a season of concerts and proms and graduation parties.

And a season of barbeques and weddings and soccer and skinned knees and fireworks and maybe a week or two of vacation.

After that, it's back to the same old cycle again (brats and beer, shopping and cheer, debt and drear...)

FORCING THE ANTIQUATED AND ARTIFICIAL
(on a culture that doesn't know what you're talking about)

For all practical purposes in our culture today, there is no season of Pentecost. There is no season of Epiphany. There is no season of Lent.

We can try to keep these relics alive and teach the unknown, unpracticed seasons to our ill-attended classes. Preach them from a far-removed pulpit. We can try to make these foreign-sounding church words and non-celebrated seasons connect to their world and reality. It's a noble, if not hopeless, effort. But the fact in the mainline is that MOST people do not celebrate, understand, or live their lives any where near the seasons of the church year. They have their own seasons. If we want them to live in, with, and under the seasons of OUR church year, we're fighting a losing battle.

Most of our official church "members" are not in church MOST Sundays. (Do half of your people worship each week? You're wonderfully odd). For those who ARE in church, 90% of the adults aren't taking part in adult education. And because the RCL is set around seasons that aren't understood or practiced by our culture (except shopping season and chocolate bunny season) it doesn't appear to even our regular worshipers to have a coherent, logical understanding of Scripture as a whole or the connection between the chosen text and the actual season they're living in. 

Compoud this with the way we're teaching and preaching to a post-television culture (mostly talking AT them), and I'd guessing that 90% of the regular worshipers can't tell you what the Gospel text was last week, let alone connect it with the broader picture of Scripture as a whole.

Scripture as a Whole

Scripture as a whole. Now there's a phrase.

We need to figure out how to teach Scripture as a whole and connect TEXT to CONTEXT - the actual context/seasons of their lives - not the seasons we'd like them to celebrate.

What we're doing now, I fear, is falling through the cracks. It's not Scripture as a whole.

It's Scripture in a hole.

That's just plain lousy stewardship.

Mill stones, anyone?

Comments

[Pastor Karl F. Rist]

Wow, Rich.

How to say this gently?

I guess I can't.

I think you're way off base scrapping the seasons.

And this is coming from someone preaching and teaching in a congregation that has committed to using Bible Song as our "lectionary" (our scope and sequence), starting with Genesis 1 in September 2009.

Skilled musicians, creative artists, culturally-clued-in preachers (and a few brilliant tech team members wouldn't hurt either) can certainly find ways to relate the themes of a given church season to what is going on in people's day-to-day reality.

Take, for example, some typical Lenten themes: wandering in the wilderness, spiritual hunger/thirst, temptation, self-sacrifice. These are BIG ideas that intersect with what is really going on with people--whether they always realize it or not. Isn't the very point of gathering for worship to hear the Word proclaimed and thus to help us realize such vital things?

For example, we'll be doing the Bible Song stories of the Exodus (Passover, etc.) during Lent--how perfect that the themes of the liturgical seasons are so very BIBLICAL!

Also, for all your talk of visual learning, why would we throw out the colors of the seasons, the symbols of the seasons(for example, in Lent--a cross, a crown of thorns, a lamb, etc.), and the powerful rituals (ash on the foreheads on a Wednesday and washing feet on a Thursday--EVERY YEAR I have youth tell me how powerful these are for them) when they are exactly the kind of hands-on, potentially multi-sensory object lessons that the best brain research insists that we use?

That's enough for now. I'll drive up to Stillwater in my alb and chasuble and we'll chat some more sometime soon.

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Hi Rich,

As I think about the different sets of seasons that propel us through the year and through life, I think also of the stories we collect every time we go around the loop.

I think if the RCL doesn't do justice to God's story--telling it in a relevant, (pardon me) post-modern way using current storytelling devices, metaphors and media--then it has lost any usefulness other than providing a romanticized notion of Church unity around the world which is based more on 'coordinated playbooks' than common mission and love.

I find the story of brokenness and redemption in the TV show LOST more interesting than hearing the bible stories told in predictable, unenlightened ways. Ultimately, I believe in God's story more than I believe in the LOST story, but guess which one I set my Tivo to record every week and which my family gathers on our bed to watch breathlessly?

Let's get back to the story behind the scriptures, behind the seasons, behind the songs.