However, at the other extreme, some preachers ignore the year-long sequence, except for Christmas Day and Easter Day. While it can be argued that rigidly applying the Christian year limits Scripture selections and inhibits certain styles of preaching – such as verse-by-verse and chapter-by-chapter – its advantages should not lightly be dismissed. From personal experience, I believe that preachers in non-liturgical settings can benefit greatly from attending to this traditional structure for telling God’s “super story.”

For example, telling the story of Christmas or Easter within the Christian year framework builds carefully, Sunday-by-Sunday, through Advent and Lent, bringing discipline and structure to worship. It helps avoid quick-fire Christmas or Easter “spectaculars” that often fail to tell the wider Trinitarian story. Special days such as Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday also safeguard key doctrines. Even the most informal worship planning can gain from awareness of the Christian year.

• The micro-level. All regular worship services have structure. Even the most informal congregation has developed an expected “normal” order of events. However, significant patterns originating from early Christian worship continue to have a role.

Remember my description of tuneless preaching – that it attempts to compose novel tunes with little or no regard for two thousand years of worship practice! When the first Christians drew on the synagogue pattern of worship, and added the Lord’s Supper, they gave basis to worship as “word and sacrament.” Within a hundred years of Paul’s writings, Justin Martyr described patterns of worship that included readings, discourse, prayer and a meal. This led to thewell-known four-fold pattern: Gathering, Word, Meal and Dismissal.⁵

Removing any part inevitably sabotages the whole structure. Each element continues to have rich significance, especially for the missional church, which gathers in order to meet with God in three persons, and then is sent into the world for service. If, for example, the “dismissal” is omitted, worship misses the vital mission dimension that the church has practiced through centuries. These older patterns enshrine rich Christian experience and safeguard against narcissistic current culture that can turn worship services into consumer events.

Shape worship content. At the macro level of worship, lectionary texts tell the Christian story, with disciplined progression through Old and New Testament texts. At the micro level, the Word forms one of the four key elements. However, Scripture’s role in shaping the rest of a worship service vitally concerns preachers. Interestingly, Russell Mitman, a liturgist, argues that worship services need to be designed “in the shape of Scripture.” He claims that “Scripture has the innate capacity to shape, not only the sermon that is part of the worship event, but also the whole of the liturgical action itself.”⁶

While (some) preachers work hard to let Scripture shape how the sermon works, both preachers and worship leaders have responsibility to work out how Scripture shapes the whole act of worship. Actually, Mitman wants to go further. Believing that the “whole liturgical action itself becomes a proclamatory event,” that preaching cannot be separated from the rest of worship, he developed a structure for involving the church community. As a parish pastor, he met weekly with a group of lay persons to study the texts to share in the interpretive task and then he planned a sequence of “acts throughout the whole worship event that aim, in their totality, at a communal enactment of the Word of God.”⁷