Reflections on Worship and the Christian Year
Scott Hoezee, director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary, recently presented these reflections on worship and the Christian year to a Seminary course on the Christian year, and agreed to share them here:
This afternoon the three of us speak to you from our varied experiences, a good deal of which ties in with when it was we received our formal education and when we entered the life and work of ministry in the church. In terms of myself, I graduated from CTS in 1990, which means I was here just at the time when the liturgical tectonic plates were starting to grind past one another in the CRC. That is to say, when I was here, the old way of teaching worship and liturgy was in its last days, soon to be replaced by the kind of curriculum that Dr. Witvliet and others brought to this Seminary and, by extension, to the wider Christian Reformed denomination beginning in the mid-1990s.
Over the last two years, I have been working on a history book about the CRCNA that is to be released in conjunction with the denomination’s sesquicentennial (or 150th birthday) next year in 2007. My assignment for that book was to give a little attention to the CRC’s first 100 years but to give primary focus to just the last 50 years from 1957-2007. To put it mildly, this last half-century has been one of tremendous change and upheaval, not least on the liturgical front.
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