Christmas Sunday & the marks of the Church

From the time of the Reformation, Protestants have used three "marks" to identify true Churches: the faithful preaching of the Word, the proper administration of the sacraments, and the Biblical exercise of Church discipline. As Westminster Confession of Faith 25.4-5 recognize, these marks are not absolute rules, but are observed on something like a sliding scale, as particular Churches are "more or less pure" according to how purely they exercise these marks.

Two out of these three marks are explicitly liturgical, that is, concerned with the Church's Lord's Day worship, and the third is at least implicitly liturgical. This is why I've come to believe American evangelicalism has definitely begun its slide into apostasy.

Do a Google search for "no Sunday services on Christmas," or something similar, and you'll get a remarkable number of hits. While at least one Denver-area congregation points to the difficulty of using its rented facilities due to the holiday, most of these evangelical congregations (and all the ones I found give every indication of being in the evangelical camp, as opposed to, say, mainline Protestant) either give no explanation or say Christmas is a day to spend with family. As a Christian who has a family which includes small children, I agree that Christmas is certainly a day to spend with family; it's just that Sunday is always a day to spend with family in worship services.

I don't know how to quantify this phenomenon, but I'll guess the number of congregations cancelling Sunday services this December 25, 2011 is fairly small, percentage-wise. Nonetheless, the fact this story is attracting much less attention than it did back in 2005 is telling: the evangelical community has become that much more indifferent to Lord's Day worship. Not hostile, mind you: just indifferent as to whether worship services on the Christian Sabbath are all that necessary to a Church's identity.

Which brings me back to my main point: if a group of people don't even gather together to perform those exercises which might serve as marks of a true Church, can they be considered a Church at all?

The restlessness of the temp

Whilst in seminary, I worked as a security guard for Pinkerton, assigned to the Hewlett-Packard plant in north San Diego county. Like the security guards, most (if not all) of H-P's non-salaried employees were in fact contract employess, including the line workers assembling printers. A regular feature of my job came whenever a line was shut down, the product run having been completed. The standard procedure was to wait until the last day, inform the workers about halfway through the shift, and also notify them their contract was up and they were now without work. Extra guards would be assigned to the line area to make sure nothing was stolen and no one indulged in a little spiteful vandalism. At the time, it seemed to me a policy which assumed it would offend and outrage those subjected to it might need some rethinking.

In a discussion of the Sabbath as occasion for enjoyment, Peter Leithart draws out some spiritual implications of these hiring policies:

The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.