Preparing for the new church year

A minister friend of mine, who is a keen reader of my blog, asked me a little time ago if I would write a blog on ‘Preparing for the new church year’.  Hence this week’s edition of my blog.

Some might well ask what is the new church year? Most diaries which people buy have the year beginning in January, but that is not true of the church year. For Anglicans and Roman Catholics and other followers of a church lectionary, the year church year begins with the first Sunday of Advent, but that is not what I have in mind here. Rather, in practical terms, for most ministers the new church year begins with the first Sunday of September, by which time most young families have returned home from their holidays, with the children ready to begin school. At that point all the church organisations and activities restart, and perhaps indeed there may be new activities too.

So how might ministers prepare for the new church year? Essentially it is a planning exercise.  Planning is vital for churches, just as it is for any human organisation.  There is an old saying which says, “If you fail to plan – you plan to fail!”. That may sound very secular, and yet within a church context this secular skill is given a spiritual dimension.  When I was leading my first church in Altrincham, and then after my time as a college principal, leader my second church in Chelmsford, my planning would begin probably just after the previous Easter in terms of getting well known speakers for programmes in the next church year, including the annual Church Anniversary, and then in terms of other events and what I would preach on in the new church year, I began to give those things thought toward the end of July, at which point I would then go away on holiday for two or three weeks in August, before returning in time for the new church year.

So what kind of things did I plan?  Let me give you a few examples. For instance right from the beginning of my ministry in Chelmsford every ‘term’ (by term I mean autumn, spring, and the period following Easter) I would get others to help me organise a ‘Name Tag’ Sunday. On these Sundays, at all the services of the day (in those days we had at least three services on a Sunday), we would ensure that as people entered our church building ready for worship, they were all asked to fill in a ‘tag’ on which they wrote their name – the  Christian name in large letters, and the surname in small letters – and then attach the tag to their jacket, or dress, or pullover.  I was determined to help my people get to know one another, and to begin to know one another starts with knowing their name.  Jesus said, “I know my sheep by name” (John 10.3; 10.27), and I encouraged people to get to follow the example of Jesus.  Within the services on that day, I would normally interview one or two people about their work or the church activity in which they were involved, and at the end pray for them. In this way the congregation was helped to get to know individuals or couples in the church. Linked with these Sundays were also hospitality Sundays, when we encouraged our church members to invite people who attended our church back home that day, whether it be for lunch or for tea, or perhaps just a coffee or a tea.

Then another example of a special service which I planned every term was an ‘International Sunday evening’.  When I first went to Chelmsford, with a very few exceptions, the church was almost exclusively white. However within a few years we had people from all over the world worshipping with us:  for instance, we had lots of church members from Nigeria and Ghana, from other places in Africa such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, as also from Zambia and South Africa, and from Egypt and Palestine, from Burma (now Myanmar), from Hong Kong, from the USA and the Caribbean, and other places too.  On these occasion everybody was asked to bring along a plate of food representative of their culture, and within an International Sunday evening, we would be eating and drinking coffee, tea, and fruit juices (in a Baptist context alcohol was normally taboo, although at Christmas we did allow the serving of hot red wine, and at weddings, after the marriage service had taken place, we allowed the serving of Prosecco which was offered to every person present, including those who were not going on to the wedding reception).   There were quizzes with an international theme.  In addition, of course, there was the singing of hymns and songs, each one of which was selected to be representative of the different countries from which people came.  Again, there were interviews of some of our international friends. Instead of my normal 20- or 25-minute sermon,  I gave just a five minute ‘talk’ in which I reflected on a passage from the Bible which in one way or another was relevant for the international evening.

Other special services which needed to be put into the calendar were what we Baptists call ‘dedication services’ at which young couples brought their children to receive a blessing from God, and for the parents to promise before the congregation to bring up their children in such a way that they in turn would come to love Jesus as their Saviour.  Anglicans and others would perhaps call it a ‘dry baptism’!  Baptism in our context was always for ‘believers’, and these too had to be planned.  Most terms we had at least two baptismal services a term, sometimes with as many as ten people, and on other occasions perhaps just two or three people being baptised. I told the baptismal candidates that their job was to fill the church on the occasion of their baptism: if they were young people, I told them to bring along their parents and other relatives, their teachers and their school friends; of if they were people who had left school and were at work, then I told them to bring along their work colleagues, their boss if it at all possible, as well as their friends and their relatives. Very often the church was packed on such an occasion. Afterwards, which was the case at every ordinary service too, people were invited to stay on for tea or coffee, along perhaps with a slice of cake or a biscuit. Indeed, our church was so planned, that people who attended our services had to go through the area where refreshments were being served.

Yet other special services, which needed to be planned, were the main festivals of the church: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Harvest, and other more special days like New Year. There were also other special services including the annual ‘Missionary Sunday’, when missionaries working with the Baptist Missionary Society were invited to come and speak at our services.  There were ‘family services’ which took place once a month, at which the children did not go out to their Junior Church services but instead stayed in with everybody else, at which the family service team sought to ensure that there was a message suitable for children as well as for adults. There were regular  ‘Guest Services’ , at which we encouraged our people to invite their friends in the knowledge that the service would focus on the difference that Jesus makes to our lives. And so I could go on: the annual Tear Fund service, the annual Christian Aid Service, the annual All Saints Day Sunday to which we invited everybody who had lost a loved one in the past twelve months, Remembrance Sunday, Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, Stewardship Sundays – you name it, and we had it!

Finally there were the normal Sundays.  Like most Baptist churches then, we did not follow the Lectionary, instead I planned series of sermons, in which I ensured that in the autumn I always preached from the Old Testament, in the Spring I always preached from the Gospels, while in the summer I always preached from the Epistles and other books of the Bible such as Acts and Revelation.

Alas, I have taken up more than enough space, but I hope that my minister friend as also my other readers will be interested and hopefully even stimulated by what I have written about preaching for the new church year.