I do not subscribe to any liturgical calendar because of the aggregation of these realities…
1. Liturgical calendars are extrabiblical: The Old Testament gives us a different annual calendar and the New Testament gives us only a weekly calendar.
2. They are confining: if the text and the Spirit so lead, I will preach on the incarnation in June, the resurrection in February. I will fast in December if the life of discipleship brings me there.
3. They represent a bad approach to church history. I completed a PhD in church history—I believe in the value of it. But the value of history lies in helping us to encounter the word of God less myopically, not in borrowing another generation’s novelties.
4. Also, this movement toward the liturgical calendar among evangelicals, while prompted by a helpful willingness to read back past the Reformation, has prematurely dismissed the valid concerns about things like the liturgical calendar that Reformation thinkers articulated.
5. Let’s be real and introspective about my idiosyncrasies that contribute here: advent and lent and the like among Baptists are faddish things, and I’m as counter-faddish as anyone I know.
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