Ordinary Sundays

The work that holds a congregation together, week after week

Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday in the church year not named for an event. Yet it opens the door to the longest stretch of the church year: Ordinary Time. After the bright white of Easter and the fire of Pentecost, the calendar shifts to green, and settles in for a while. That green feels right. Slow, steady growth, season after season.

Ordinary Time is the season that belongs most to lay ministry. It runs about half the year, twenty-six Sundays with no feast day, and lay leadership is what carries a congregation through that stretch. Clergy often step forward on the high holy days. The long green season is often guided by lay leaders who teach, visit, serve, and hold the community together, week after week.

I think about the high holy days of Christmas, Holy Week, Easter Vigil, Pentecost. It’s all so intense, and the congregation often shows up gathered and attentive. That’s simply the nature of high holy days.

But from now until Advent, what holds the congregation together is people. It’s people like the Godly Play teacher who shows up in September when exactly four kids are in the room and makes it count anyway. The Eucharistic visitor who drives out to someone’s house because they haven’t been able to get to church in three months. The vestry member who stays after the meeting to help a newcomer feel welcomed. The altar guild member who sets the table week after week, not because it’s dramatic, but because it needs to get done and they’re committed to doing it.

This is lay ministry. This is the actual practice of lay ministry in real time on unremarkable Sundays. Ordination and titles have nothing to do with it, but it does require commitment and follow-through.

There’s something else Ordinary Time offers, and we don’t talk about it enough: time to breathe.

Not every Sunday needs to feel like Easter Sunday. The church year has already done that work. Easter happened. The Spirit came. We’ve been through it, and it mattered. But some Sundays are just Sundays. A familiar liturgy, a sermon that lands somewhere in the middle, coffee hour with the same people you’ve known for years. Communities are sustained by that kind of rhythm.

You can’t sustain a congregation at high speed every week. If anyone tried to make every Sunday feel like Easter, it would be exhausting for clergy, confusing for congregants, and simply not true to how spiritual life actually works. Faith isn’t always revved up with meaning, and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s just practice. We show up, say the words, receive the bread and wine, and go home. That regularity shapes us and deepens our faith.

In my experience supporting lay leaders across the diocese, burnout sometimes comes from rarely feeling like the work counts. They taught Godly Play for six years and nobody told them that was holy work. They served on the altar guild and assumed the clergy were the real ministers. Ordinary Time is a good moment to correct that. To tell the people around you, this is your season. The long green season. And the work you’re doing is ministry, even when it doesn’t feel like it, even when there isn’t a feast day to tie to it.

Especially on an ordinary Sunday.