Babelscattered

What’s your schedule tomorrow? My priest likes to paint her fingernails the color of the church season, and she was frantically trying to find a moment between Advent 4 and Christmas.

For many churches, especially more structured (aka “liturgical”) ones, the church year begins four weeks before Christmas with the season of Advent. After Advent comes (the twelve days of) Christmas, which ends on Epiphany. The Season after Epiphany is the first season known as Ordinary Time, the longest periods of the year. Lent begins forty days before Easter, and Easter is followed by Pentecost, the second period of Ordinary Time, and the last and longest season.

The seasons are structured around the major events of the New Testament, and they mark changes in the focus of worship - Advent is a time of waiting, Lent is penitential, etc. We read different parts of the Bible, sing different hymns, etc. They also function as administrative units of church life.

Each season has a corresponding color, which is used in the altar hangings and the preacher’s vestments. Advent is blue (purple in some churches, and in many places the third Sunday is pink), Pentecost is green, and I can’t remember the others. There are meanings attached, but the colors are also just lovely decorative markers of where we are in the year.

You mentioned a regional office - can you elaborate on that? My understanding of Disciples was that, since you have congregational polity, your church is in charge of itself and its own decisions. I could be totally wrong, though. How much power or influence does your denomination have as a whole?