The Long Green Season

A colleague of mine — someone I've known for almost fifteen years, another worship leader, a careful and thoughtful one — said something to me last summer that I've been sitting with ever since.

We were talking about the church year, somewhere in the middle of July. I'd been writing about the liturgical seasons, and he asked how the series was going. I told him I was about to write about Ordinary Time. He laughed — not dismissively, just honestly — and said: "I never know what to do with that stretch. Advent I get. Lent I get. But from Pentecost to November?" He paused. "It just feels like the church is waiting for the year to get interesting again."

I didn't push back. Because I've felt exactly the same way.

Ordinary Time — at least the long stretch most people mean when they use the phrase — runs from the Monday after Pentecost Sunday through the Saturday before Advent. Depending on the year, that's somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-eight Sundays. Roughly half the year, sometimes more.

The name trips people up. Ordinary doesn't mean unremarkable or filler. The word comes from the Latin ordinalis — numbered, ordered. These are the counted Sundays: the Second, the Third, the Fourth, stretching through summer and fall until Advent arrives and the cycle begins again. Ordinary as in sequential. Ordinary as in the regular rhythm of a life.

The color is green — not the gold of Easter or the deep purple of Advent, but something quieter. The color of a field in July, patient and unhurried. The color of things that are growing without announcing it.

I have to be honest: for most of my years as a worship leader, Ordinary Time was the stretch I defaulted to autopilot. Not on purpose. It's just that the dramatic seasons gave me something to work with. Advent had a particular mood to build toward. Lent had weight. Easter had momentum. Pentecost, once I started paying attention to it, had the force of something overdue.

But from June through October? I'd find myself reaching for what had worked before — familiar songs, familiar structures, nothing wrong with any of it — but I wasn't asking what the season was asking. Partly because I didn't think the season was asking anything. I thought it was just time passing.

That instinct ran deeper than I realized. I had been shaped — by conferences, by the worship culture I grew up in, by my own temperament — to chase the significant moment. The service where something unmistakably happened. The song that landed. The Sunday where you could feel the room shift.

Ordinary Time doesn't give you those very often. Which I used to read as a failure of something.

What I've slowly come to understand is that the season isn't failing. It's doing something different — something that can't happen in the dramatic seasons precisely because those seasons are too intense.

Formation doesn't primarily happen in moments of intensity. I'm not sure anyone told me that, or if someone did, it didn't land. The Sundays I can't remember — the ones in late July and early September when I showed up anyway, when nothing felt particularly alive and I prayed imperfectly and heard Scripture and sang familiar songs and went home — those are probably the ones quietly doing the most work. Slowly. Without announcement.

The green isn't the color of a moment. It's the color of a field three months into summer — changed almost imperceptibly from one day to the next, but unmistakably different from what it was in spring.

The arc of this series has moved through the whole Trinitarian story: the Son entering our humanity at Christmas, the Son raised at Easter, the Spirit poured out at Pentecost. Ordinary Time is where all of that becomes embodied in actual human life — not in a single dramatic moment, but in the accumulated weight of ordinary weeks. The Spirit slowly conforming us to the image of the Son who has already lived this faithful, hidden, ordinary human life on our behalf. That's what the green season holds: not a self-improvement program, but participation in something already accomplished. Week by week. Sunday by Sunday.

I think about my colleague's comment a lot. Waiting for the year to get interesting again. I understand it. I've lived it. But I'm less sure now that "interesting" is the right thing to be waiting for.

The long green season isn't interesting in the way Advent is, or Lent, or Easter. It doesn't ask you to feel a particular thing. It doesn't hold a feast or mark a crisis. It just asks you to keep showing up — to the community, to Scripture, to the table — and trust that something is happening even when you can't see it.

Most of the Christian life is lived here. And the church, in its wisdom, gave the longest season of the year to this. Not to preparation. Not to celebration. To the long patient work of becoming.

I'm still learning to inhabit it. Some summers I find it easier than others. There are Sundays in September when I'm genuinely surprised that I feel something — not a peak experience, just a quiet sense of being held inside something larger than my own efforts. That the worship I'm part of is doing something in me that I'll only be able to name much later, if at all.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's what the green is.