Maybe you’ve noticed it too. On various apps and sites, the calendar has shifted to Monday as the first day of the week. If you want to keep Sunday as Day 1, you can sometimes tailor the calendar to your preference, but the default has changed.
This comes as no surprise. Most people look at Saturday and Sunday as a pair—two days at the end of the week. “What is a weekend?” asked the elderly Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey, delightfully clueless as to how the working class a century ago conceived of time. Since regular business hours are Monday to Friday, it makes sense when people assume Monday is the best candidate for Day 1. It’s the start of the workweek.
But that’s just it. Collapsing the week into the workweek is what troubles me.
Week and Workweek
The way we orient ourselves in time—how we think of our days—makes a difference in how we conceive of our life and purpose. Our choices in how we order time contain moral instruction.
Starting the week with Monday indicates we see our lives primarily in terms of work. Productivity matters most. Contrast a Monday-first mindset with a Sunday-first outlook. When the week begins with worship and rest, everything that follows gets cast in the light of grace and gratitude. Work becomes a subset of worship. We begin not with what we do but with who we are in Christ.
Are Sundays Special?
But Trevin, you say. Sundays aren’t that different anymore. So the calendar shift doesn’t matter that much. True, unfortunately. Even for many Christians, aside from an hour or so spent in church, the rest of the day slips into the same leisure activities as Saturday—or for some, becomes just another day of work at one of the countless places open all week long.
But the way we treat Sunday puts us out of step with our forefathers and mothers in the faith. The original consensus statement adopted by Southern Baptists nearly a century ago, The Baptist Faith and Message, not only devoted an entire article to the Lord’s Day but also specified what proper stewardship of Sunday looked like:
The first day of the week is the Lord’s day. It is a Christian institution for regular observance. It commemorates the resurrection of Christ from the dead and should be employed in exercises of worship and spiritual devotion, both public and private, and by refraining from worldly amusements, and resting from secular employments, works of necessity and mercy only excepted.
When the statement was revised in 2000, the last portion—about refraining from worldly amusements or secular employments—was dropped in favor of a generic appeal to “the Christian’s conscience under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”
There’s no doubt the more recent version better captures the consensus of Southern Baptists today, but is the change an improvement? Is the absence of restriction—which coincides with a cultural shift away from treating Sundays as special—a sign of increasing faithfulness or cultural accommodation? I wonder if I’ve been too quick to treat Sunday just like Saturday but with a morning of churchgoing thrown in.
Why Sunday?
In A Brief History of Sunday, Justo González explains why Christians chose Sunday for public worship. It’s the Lord’s Day because it’s the start of new creation, when Jesus rose from the grave, a day that points forward to eternal rest and joy.
As Christianity influenced and shaped the culture, the merging of Sunday worship and Sabbath rest became commonplace, even for nominal and non-Christians, a sign of the gospel’s leavening effect.
The Calendar Teaches
A calendar teaches. I have a pastor friend whose family celebrates the Sabbath from Friday evening to Saturday evening, complete with candle lighting, liturgical recitation, and the absence of internet access from sundown to sundown. He leads his wife and kids as they enter the Sabbath. Their practice is deeply formative and instructive. Setting apart “a holy day,” wrote Marva Dawn, is one way the kingdom “reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us so it can reign through us.”
The calendar matters. During WWII, the Italian priest Don Gaetano Tantalo hid two Jewish families in his home and church for nine months. He facilitated their religious observance, even to the point of seeking out the special foods they’d need for the Seder. In Israel’s Museum of the Holocaust, there’s a piece of paper with numbers written down. It’s from 1944, and the numbers were calculations—Tantalo’s effort to quietly kept track of the Jewish calendar so his Jewish friends would know the dates of their holy days.
The calendar doesn’t only teach; it reveals. One reason the 12 Days of Christmas seems strange (decorations still up in January!) is because the “Christmas season” has been shaped by consumerism. I confess I’m a “deck the halls” early kind of guy, despite the warnings of Chesterton and others, but I understand and commend those who think it best to resist this cultural deviation by establishing counterformative practices.
Congregations are shaped by the calendar too. Churches that frown on the traditional Christian year—with its distinctive seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide, and Pentecost (and the marvelously titled “Ordinary Time”)—usually replace those great moments in the biblical storyline with cultural markers, mostly driven by consumer impulses: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the bookends of summer (Memorial Day and Labor Day).
No one claims there’s a divine command to follow the traditional church calendar, but let’s not underestimate the pedagogical power in how we mark time. Big government and big business recognize the calendar’s influence. Why else is there “Pride Month” if not to celebrate expressive individualism (transposed in the key of the sexual revolution) and thereby form and educate the citizenry on identities and behaviors now considered worthy of moral recognition and affirmation?
Back to Sunday
Calendars aren’t neutral. So when you notice the shift on your electronic device away from Sunday as the first day of the week, resist going along. Push back by changing your preferences. Even better, let’s give more thought to the way we inhabit the Lord’s Day.
We’re Christians. We follow King Jesus. We mark out one day a week—the first, not the last—to worship the risen Lord. We sing of his goodness and grace and trust his promise to return and blast away death forever. Sunday is his day. And he comes first.
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