We are free, and responsible, to order time wisely. To establish commemorations that celebrate the great acts of God for our corporate memory. To inhabit the story of redemption in the rhythm of our common life.
It must be acknowledged that our Reformed and Presbyterian tradition has had an ambivalent relationship with the Church calendar. Many of our Reformed brothers and sisters reject the vast majority of it, with some even eschewing Christmas and Easter, in favor of only celebrating the Lord’s Day. The claim is often made that the regulative principle forbids anything besides the weekly participation in Sunday worship for the Lord’s Day.
But does it?
Below I argue that the regulative principle does not prohibit use of the Church calendar, and then make a case for its use. Together, I present historical, biblical, theological, and pastoral (practical) reasons for following the Church calendar.
The Regulative Principle
In their zeal against the excesses of Roman Catholic traditions, the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians largely rejected the observance of Christmas, Easter, and the broader liturgical year. They appealed to the regulative principle of worship, which basically says that if God has not expressly commanded a practice in Scripture, it has no place in the church’s worship.
As a Presbyterian church, we hold to the regulative principle. It is an important safeguard against human invention in the worship of God, and the Westminster Standards enshrine it rightly. The question is: does the Church calendar actually violate the regulative principle?
“If our reading of the regulative principle would require us to say that Jesus was sinning at Hanukkah, something has gone wrong with our systematic theology.”
Church history is more complicated than the strict Puritan narrative suggests. The continental Reformed churches, including those most directly shaped by John Calvin, retained Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost as important occasions for the Lord’s Supper. The Lutherans largely kept the Church calendar as well. The stricter British and Scottish rejection of the Church calendar was not universally shared, even amongst other Protestant and Reformed denominations. Dr. Glenn Sunshine, a Reformation historian, argues that the narrower English Puritan reading of the regulative principle was shaped more by the concerns about Catholic excess than by principled theology. At the time, the calendar had become cluttered with hundreds of local and universal saints’ days where normal labor was forbidden, and certain holy days became associated with folk superstitions that the Puritans viewed as a Christianized version of pagan ritualism. Sunshine argues that the anti-calendar perspective arose as a reaction against these practices, then sought theological justifications after the fact.[1] Had there never been abuses, it's unlikely the anti-calendar perspective would've emerged organically from the study of the Scripture.
In fact, the opposite is the case. The regulative principle does more to support the use of the church calendar than forbid it. God not only permitted but actively commanded annual feasts in the Old Testament alongside the weekly Sabbath. When the Jews added Purim, a feast that did not have Mosaic warrant, God did not condemn it. Jesus himself participated in the Feast of Dedication (John 10:22), Hanukkah, a feast with no Mosaic warrant whatsoever. The same Christians whose faulty understanding of the regulative principle leads them to believe that Christians can only sing Psalms (which never mention the name of Christ), or that instruments are prohibited in worship today because they are not mentioned in the New Testament, make a similar mistake with the Church calendar. When Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, he was not engaging in false worship - he was honoring a legitimate human commemoration of a great act of God’s deliverance. If our reading of the regulative principle would require us to say that Jesus was sinning at Hanukkah, something has gone wrong with our systematic theology.
The early Reformed tradition recognized this. The Heidelberg Catechism and the Synod of Dordt both prescribed a calendar that included Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer retained even more liturgical structure while shedding the extrabiblical Catholic traditions that the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians rightly rejected. The Puritan departure was a departure from the earlier Reformed consensus, not an expression of it.
It wasn’t simply the sacrificial system of the Old Testament that pointed to Christ; the liturgical calendar did, too. Now, in Christ we have been exalted over the calendar. We are free, and responsible, to order time wisely. To establish commemorations that celebrate the great acts of God for our corporate memory. To inhabit the story of redemption in the rhythm of our common life. The Church calendar is “an annual reminder and reenactment of salvation history, thereby sacralizing time;” if we abandon that structure, we impoverish our people, surrendering the cultural ground that Christ has claimed.[2]
The Postmillennial Stakes
The argument for observing the Church calendar is not merely historical or liturgical. It is also eschatological. What you believe about where history is headed determines how you consider the question of who orders time in the present.
Postmillennialism does not see Christ’s present reign as a placeholder. It is not merely a spiritual truth awaiting future fulfillment in the physical world. Rather, it is a living, active, and expanding reality here on earth. At Christ’s Ascension, he did not retreat from history but was installed as the Lord of history. When the Father set Christ at his right hand, far above every authority, power, and dominion, he gave him the name above every name and placed all things under Christ’s feet (Ephesians 1:20-21). The nations are his inheritance, and the kingdoms of this world are becoming his (Psalm 2:8; Revelation 11:5).
This means that history has a direction. The Church is not merely rescuing survivors from a sinking world. It is the advancing army of the King of kings, tasked with the discipling of nations, the transformation of cultures, and the bringing of every sphere of life (including the ordering of time) under the lordship of Christ. The Great Commission is not a spiritual evacuation plan. It is a comprehensive mandate to teach the nations to observe all that Christ has commanded, until the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14).
The Old Testament festal calendar was provisional. Jason Farley, in his essay “The Sunrise of History,” points to a compelling detail about the reference point of that calendar: it was structured around the moon. The moon is the lesser light that borrowed its glory from the sun, and governs the night. In an age of anticipation, of waiting for Christ, this was a fitting reference point. The feasts of ancient Israel were merely shadows pointing forward to their Messiah, who had not yet come. The Passover looked to Christ’s sacrifice. The Feast of First Fruits pointed to his resurrection. The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) anticipated the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. These religious feasts were real and ordained by God, but their glory had not yet appeared. Israel lived in the long night before the dawn.
This changed at the New Covenant. Farley makes the argument that the transition from the lunar to the solar calendar is itself a redemptive-historical symbol: the dawn of history has finally come. The night is now over, since the Sun of Righteousness (the Son of God) has risen.[3] This squares with Colossians 2, which argues that the Old Covenant festivals were a shadow of what was to come in Christ.
In the age of the expansion of Christ’s kingdom, the question of how we order time is more important, not less. Following the Church calendar is not a return to Mosaic shadows, but the free exercise of New Covenant wisdom in telling time according to the reality of Christ’s completed and ongoing work.
A church with a robust postmillennial theology and no liturgical calendar is a church that has not yet thought through the implications of its own eschatology. We live in an age marked by the reign of Christ, Anno Domini: The Year of our Lord. If Christ is truly advancing his kingdom through history, if the nations are truly being discipled, if all things are truly being placed under his feet, then the question of how the years are named, and what feasts we celebrate, is not a matter of liturgical preference. The calendar we use is a matter of kingdom progress or retreat.
How We Live This Out
Recovering the Church calendar is not primarily about adding liturgical ceremony to Sunday worship, though that is a part of it. It is about reorienting the entire rhythm of a church’s life, and by extension the life of Christian families, around the story that calendar tells: the gospel.
When Advent is taught and observed as a season of anticipation rather than a commercialized lead-up to Christmas, when Christmas is observed for twelve days rather than collapsed to December 25th, when Ascension Sunday is preached with the political weight it deserves, when the high moment at Easter is the baptism of new Christians instead of a basket of candy … the Church is being formed to a particular vision of reality. The Church is learning whose world this is.
“Christians are a community ordered by a different story.”
The Church calendar also extends into the home. It is most powerfully observed at the level of the family, in the memories it forms in Christian families as foods are prepared for Christian feast days. Often our biggest memories as children are the embodied, sensory practices that our families celebrated each year. The stories told to children about why this day is different from other days, why candles are lit, why trees are decorated, why cakes are baked, why hymns are sung, are all traditions that accumulate over generations. A child who grows up marking the seasons of the church year carries that rhythm in their body. The story of God becomes their identity; the story of that redemption reminds them of home.
And this cultural weight extends beyond the church and the home. A community of Christians who visibly follow a different calendar than the world around them, who are fasting when secular culture is feasting, or feasting when the world has moved on, is a testimony to the true story of the world. When Christians celebrate Christ on days that people of other religions ignore, they are making a public witness. Not through argument, but through their joy. Christians are a community ordered by a different story.
The Church calendar is the instrument by which we keep ourselves oriented towards the reality we live in - and by which we invite the world to join us in our feasting. It is a vital way of communicating the great acts of God to ourselves, our children, and our communities year after year, until this story is known deep in our bones.
Interested in more on this topic? Read pastor Nate Walker’s response to objections about observing Lent, or other articles from Jon’s ongoing series on the church calendar.
[1] Glenn Sunshine, “The Church Year,” Substack, November 19, 2025. https://glennsunshine.substack.com/p/the-church-year
[2] Ibid
[3 Jason Farley, “The Sunrise of History,” Substack. https://jasonfarley.substack.com/p/the-sunrise-of-history
