For a moderate Sabbatarianism

How can the church invite people to more fully keep the Lord's Day?

One of the great joys of being in England for research right now is that I am often able to attend a choral evensong on Sunday afternoons after morning services. I’ll go somewhere for Communion the morning, and then have some time for lunch and then a stroll-and-pray or a bit of spiritual reading in a cafe, and then return to church for a gorgeous sung service. If I’m lucky, there might even be a second sermon.

If this sounds like something out of Barchester Towers, first of all, thank you, but secondly, this is for a reason: this was the normative pattern of Anglican Sunday worship for hundreds of years. The idea that Sunday religious duty just meant an hour or two Sunday morning, and that the rest of the day was one’s to do with as one pleased, is actually very new. Rather, even those who opposed the Sabbatarianism of the Puritans look rather like Sabbatarians by contemporary standards.

The thirteenth canon of those adopted in 1604 by Convocation spells out the expected picture of Sunday and holy day observance for English Christians:

All manner of Persons within the Church of England, shall from henceforth celebrate and keep the Lord’s Day, commonly called Sunday, and other Holy-days according to God’s holy Will and Pleasure, and the Orders of the Church of England, prescribed in that behalf; that is, in hearing the Word of God read and taught in private and publick Prayers, in acknowledging their Offences to God and amendment of the same, in reconciling themselves charitably to their Neighbours where Displeasures have been, in oftentimes receiving the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, in visiting of the Poor and Sick, using all godly and sober Conversation.

That is, Sundays as well as other holy days were to be spent devoted to God. You were to attend public prayers and preaching and (if applicable) receive the sacrament. As we will see, the public prayers in question included both morning and evening worship, not just the Sunday morning diet to which most of us are accustomed. But public worship did not exhaust the duties of the day. You were also to spend time in private prayer, reconcile strained relationships, exercise charity, and generally be occupied in a godly way.

Puritans, whether nonconforming or conforming, tended to be particularly concerned with the Sabbath. The conforming Puritan Lewis Bayly provided a good example of such Sabbath observance in his prominent devotional manual The Practice of Piety, in which he argues that “the sanctifying of the Sabbath consists in two things—First, In resting from all servile and common business pertaining to our natural life; Secondly, In consecrating that rest wholly to the service of God, and the use of those holy means which belong to our spiritual life.” Thus labor, travelling “for profit or for pleasure,”¹ the reading of non-religious books, recreation and sports, markets, gluttonous eating, and worldly talk must all be rejected. Instead Sabbaths must be spent in preparation for public worship, at public worship itself (both in the morning and in the evening), and then reflecting on the sermons heard, visiting the poor and needy, meditating on God’s work in creation and redemption,² and in prayer and devotion.

But even non-Puritan divines — indeed, even anti-Puritan writings — assume that the bulk of Sundays are to be spent in religious devotion. Take, for example, the Book of Sports, issued by James I and then again by Charles I on the subject of lawful Sunday and holy day recreation. Against the condemnation of sports and recreation that one finds in Puritan divines like Bayly, this declaration famously (and controversially!) asserted the appropriateness of “lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, …having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used.” “For when shall the common people have leave to exercise, if not upon the Sundays and Holy-days, seeing they must apply their labor and win their living in all working days?”, the declaration asks. But note well: this recreation was lawful “after the afternoon sermon or service…upon the Sunday’s afternoon.” That is, this text, which was considered so unforgivably lax by Jacobean and Carolingian Puritans, assumes an entire rest from labor on Sundays and holy days, and that non-religion lawful fun is allowable only after two services on Sundays!

Jeremy Taylor’s famous 1650 The Rule of Holy Living similarly argues for keeping the Lord’s Day with a release from regular labor, attendance at both morning and evening worship, and then a day otherwise spent in private devotion, reading and singing psalms, visiting the sick, caring for the poor, reconciling disputes, and so forth. Especially for laborers, games and recreation are allowable — although these must not be unlawful, scandalous, or leading to sin. He adds to this (doubtless with Puritans in mind) a word about the danger of demanding yet stricter Sabbath observance: “Beyond these bounds…we must preserve our Christian liberty, and not suffer ourselves to be entangled with a yoke of bondage.” But this warning should not blind us to how much he shares with someone like Lewis Bayly. For both men, if in slightly different ways, Sundays are for the public and private worship of God.

Now, of course, we should not assume that such expectations around devoted Sabbath observance were always reflected in the life of English Christians. Indeed, the fact that they were reiterated so often and so strenuously suggests that Sundays were not often kept to English divines’ liking. Bayly says as much, asking:

Who without mourning can endure to see Christians keep the Lord’s day, as if they celebrated a feast rather to Bacchus, than to the honour of the Lord Jesus, the Saviour and Redeemer of the world? For, having served God but an hour in outward shew, they spend the rest of the Lord’s day in sitting down to eat and drink, and rising up to play; first ballasting their bellies with eating and drinking, and then feeding their lusts with playing and dancing.

All the same, how far we are today from even the expectation that Sundays should be kept as a holy day devoted to the Lord! Urging weekly attendance on Sunday mornings often seems to be a step too far. To be fair, you will occasionally hear injunctions to observe a Sabbath or rest-day from mainline pulpits. But this is generally seen as a matter of time for recreation and relaxation alone. Such pursuits were (rightly, to my mind) allowed as part of how Sundays were to be kept in, say, The Book of Sports, but were a relatively minor aspect thereof. And moreover, such relaxation is not really seen as something done as part of church life, but as a purely private pursuit — and, frankly, even the command to relax is honored more in the breach than in the observance anyway.

Old-fashioned though it may be, I have found there to be something deeply edifying and helpful about devoting more time than just a few hours on Sunday morning to Christ in a special way, to committing myself to mark the entire day as distinct and set apart. I need, and I daresay we all need, a thicker diet of devotion and Christian fellowship than sixty to ninety minutes of public worship and fifteen to thirty minutes at coffee hour. Spending time in prayer, Scripture, and spiritual reading, finding additional opportunities for public worship, making a point of reaching out to friends and family members, going on long walks, foreswearing work (ideally all day long, and at the very least till after Evening Prayer): all this helps me to reflect more fully on what God has done for me in Jesus Christ, rejoice, and give thanks.³

It seems to me that our churches have an opportunity to suggest that such a Sunday observance is desirable and to provide opportunities for it. That is, we can welcome people into a deeper and richer Christian life, not as a matter of dour command but of invitation into the joy of spending more time with God and with each other in a world that often minimizes both. Offering evening prayer comes immediately to mind; it seems eminently possible for every parish or at least every benefice to offer Saturday evening prayer as preparation for a Sunday communion and then Sunday evening prayer to close the time of Sunday devotion.⁴ But more broadly, I think there are yet other ways the church could offer its people a way to spend Sunday mornings and afternoons together in devotion and fellowship.

Allow me a little wish-casting: imagine a parish that begins Sunday mornings with a quiet service of morning prayer and litany, and then perhaps a morning coffee and donut (or not, if you keep the eucharistic fast) before holy communion with a sermon. After the service, a potluck. And then some time for Christian education, maybe a Bible study for the adults while the pastor provides instruction to the children. Following this, some “lawful recreation”: the church provides childcare so the kids can run around together and entertain themselves, while there are board games available and more snacks for adults in the parish hall, with just hanging out and chatting also strongly welcomed (it’s not quite a Jacobean parish Morris-dance, but it’s perhaps the modern equivalent — and I’m even suggesting it before evening prayer!). The church itself would be left open for those who want to pray or read; perhaps an intercessory prayer group meets. A few people might go out to visit the homebound or anyone in the congregation in the hospital. A half hour or so before evening prayer, a few people get together around a piano and acoustic guitar to sing a few hymns, and then the congregation gathers for evening prayer with a short sermon or catechetical lecture. Afterwards, anyone still interested decamps to a pub or restaurant for a pre-dinner drink before everyone goes their separate ways.⁵

I’ll add that this vision is adaptable to a variety of churchmanships and cultural contexts. It doesn’t have to be cathedral choral evensong or the closest possible parochial equivalent thereof. Instead of the hymns around a piano and guitar, one could substitute a time of listening to or playing nondenominational or evangelical-style worship music. Instead of board games, you could play sports outside or take a hike if the weather is nice. One could even, I suppose, broadcast movies or (in the States) Sunday afternoon football.⁶

To me, this sounds like an exceedingly pleasant way to spend a Sunday. It allows for opportunities for additional worship of God. It also provides time for Christian fellowship, for people who gather together for worship to actually interact with each other more than via a handshake at the Peace and a quick hello at coffee hour — for fostering the sort of close relationships with each other that the Epistles seem to me to presume for a given Christian community.

Now, I am not unaware of the various ways that modern life is organized to make this sort of Sunday difficult. It’s true that part of what made it relatively easy for people to attend church twice a day on Sundays in the early modern era is that work or public entertainment beforehand were banned by law. Neither Netflix nor Sunday morning sports leagues nor Sunday morning shifts could interfere. Indeed, at this point, you well may be thinking, “well, this is very easy for you to hold up as a model, Ben: you don’t have children or elderly parents to care for; you have a flexible job that allows you to run errands whenever you want; etc.” And this is all true, as far as it goes.⁷

But it seems to me that the sort of adaptation of the earlier model of Sabbath-keeping I sketched out above might be worth trying all the same. Indeed, there are those who might find this a welcome respite from a Sunday of loneliness (I remember well days of singleness in which Sunday mornings were the peak of social interaction before a long and rather lonely afternoon and evening). We hear a lot these days, after all, about the crisis of loneliness, about the rarity of opportunities for screen-free, no-cost socializing. And there are those with typically busier Sundays who might find this — if offered — both edifying and enjoyable enough to adjust their schedules accordingly. It would mean changing around how we are accustomed to spend our days, yes. But it might be worth doing all the same. In the rather minor private ways I’ve tried to keep a more fulsome Sabbath myself, I’ve certainly found this to be the case.

And so, this is a plea for a moderate — really, a very moderate — Sabbatarianism. It is a plea for churches to suggest to their people a fuller pattern of keeping the Lord’s Day than Sunday worship alone. For my Episcopalian readers, such an understanding remains, in fact, the canonical teaching of our church. Thus Canon II.1:

All persons within this Church shall celebrate and keep the Lord’s Day, commonly called Sunday, by regular participation in the public worship of the Church, by hearing the Word of God read and taught, and by other acts of devotion and works of charity, using all godly and sober conversation.

And it is a plea for churches to not only teach such an observance, but to also provide models and opportunities for carrying it out: opportunities for public worship, private devotion, charity, and simply spending time together as the Body of Christ.

I’ll close by saying that you in your church (or for that matter, privately outside of formal church programming) do something like what I’ve outlined above, I would be thrilled to hear about your experiences!

1. Rather charmingly, this is because beasts of burden too should enjoy their Sabbath rest!

2. Bayly particularly suggests walks. He is on the stern side, both by the standards of his own day and certainly by today’s, but his picture of the Sabbath is not a joyless one! Here are his suggestions for Sabbath-day walking:

After evening prayer, and at thy supper, behave thyself in the like religious and holy manner as was formerly prescribed. And either before or after supper, if the season of the year and weather do serve—

1. Walk into the fields and meditate upon the works of God; for in every creature thou mayest read, as in an open book, the wisdom, power, providence, and goodness of Almighty God and that none is able to make all these things in the variety of their forms, virtues, beauties, life, motions, and qualities, but our most glorious God.

2. Consider how gracious he is that made all these things to serve us.

3. Take occasion hereby to stir up both thyself and others to admire and adore his power, wisdom, and goodness; and to think what ungrateful wretches we are, if we will not, in all obedience, serve and honour him.

4. If any neighbour be sick, or in any heaviness, go to visit him. If any be fallen at variance, help to reconcile them.

I appreciate a man who is convinced of the spiritual value of a good walk.

3. To be sure, this is a rather permissive Sabbath observance even by The Book of Sport’s standards, never mind Lewis Bayly’s.

4. Of course, part-time clergy have particular challenges here, to which I am not unsympathetic. I’ll just note that such services can be lay-led and also that churches should see this as an essential part of their cleric’s duties. Given that clergy should be saying their offices anyway, it shouldn’t be that much of a push.

5. I go back and forth on whether Christians should avoid eating out or engaging in commerce on Sundays. I am a firm supporter of blue laws, and I suppose that Christians patronizing restaurants on Sundays contributes to the demand that keeps restaurants open and thus forces servers to be scheduled for Sunday shifts. I do remember being somewhat annoyed in my restaurant server days by the post-church Sunday brunch crowd, because they inevitably tipped badly and were in some sense contributing to a way of organizing labor that kept me from public worship on Sunday mornings. At the same time, in our increasingly post-Christian context, plenty of people are perfectly happy to work on Sundays and such work isn’t keeping them from Christian worship. Indeed, I expect observant Muslims would prefer Sunday shifts to Fridays and Jews to Saturdays. And so, I don’t have so many qualms about a visit to a restaurant or pub on Sunday afternoon or evening. However, if you are going to do so, especially as a recognizable church group, generous tipping is, I think, of the upmost importance (especially in places like the US or Canada where tipping is a significant portion of server and bartender income), as is generally being polite and kind to waitstaff.

6. I do think that one of the particular advantages of the scenario I sketched above is that it allows for time in community without screens. But I do think that watching something together is quite different than a situation in which everyone is glued to their own device.

7. Although I will add that for Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans, at any rate, the general class and age makeup of our congregations means that sort of things that would keep one away from such a Sunday observance are usually self-chosen rather than matters of absolute necessity (being scheduled to work Sundays, say). What’s more, having non-Sunday-morning worship is genuinely helpful for those who truly cannot make it to church on Sunday mornings. I certainly found it so in my server days.