Tonight, my church will have its first Ash Wednesday service.
It’s a nondenominational evangelical church that meets in a high school in the heart of Hollywood, and after 20 years as a congregation, we’re adopting this centuries-old Christian tradition to mark the start of the season of Lent.
And that’s not just new for my church; it’s new for me too. Growing up in a similarly nondenominational context, I didn’t understand the church calendar or the value of formal liturgy. If anything, I thought it was at odds with my personal relationship with Christ. These scripted practices seemed inauthentic or legalistic, forcing postures I did not feel were honest to my approach to God. Why would the time of year determine my prayers? Why would a calendar tell me to lament when I might be in a season of rejoicing?
I was not alone in my skepticism. American evangelicals don’t usually follow the liturgical calendar, including Ash Wednesday services. According to a 2025 Lifeway study, only one-quarter of Americans observe the season of Lent, a figure unchanged in the last ten years. Catholics are most likely to participate, though some Protestant denominations—such as Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and some Methodists—do as well. Research from the Barna Group has likewise found that evangelicals are “least aware” of liturgical practices compared to Catholics and mainline traditions.
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Looking back, despite growing up in the faith, I don’t think I had even heard of Ash Wednesday until my 20s. Even in recent conversations, I have seen indifference toward or heard arguments against Ash Wednesday observance, with my friends saying it is not in the Bible, is not mandated as a sacrament, and comes across as performative.
But my own thinking on the day has changed. Ash Wednesday signifies our desperate need for repentance. The ashes placed on congregants’ foreheads symbolize lament and mourning, such as when “Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the ornate robe she was wearing. She put her hands on her head and went away, weeping aloud as she went” (2 Sam. 13:19). Or when Mordecai “put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the city, wailing loudly and bitterly” when he found out about the impending destruction of his people (Esther 4:1).
These actions show the complete depravity we are mired in apart from God. They help us to mourn sin and its consequences. They take our suffering seriously. From Ash Wednesday on, Lent leads to Christ’s blood poured out on the cross—and eventually the joy and relief of the Resurrection.
Once again, I’m not alone in my shift. There seems to be a newfound curiosity among American evangelicals about holy days like Ash Wednesday, as well as other high-church, liturgical, and traditional church-calendar practices.
When I went from a Los Angeles public high school to a private Christian college in the Midwest, I was introduced to a whole different world of Christianity. I was around Christians from all sorts of denominations, cracking jokes about predestination or transubstantiation that flew over my head. I was introduced to Christianese, contemporary Christian music, and the church calendar.
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I spent my years in college attending church services hosted by different denominations, and while I do not feel confident in my ability to name all the differences between many traditions, these services challenged my views on liturgy and other high-church practices. I enjoyed services that pointed toward Communion rather than the sermon. I received Communion with wine instead of grape juice for the first time and took a class on spiritual practices where I learned about The Book of Common Prayer. One course started each session with Taizé meditations, and another class ended each lecture with the professor and students singing the Doxology. My time at college was a crash course in facets of Christianity I did not have access to while I was growing up.
So when I moved back to Los Angeles with my newfound knowledge of these traditions, I was ecstatic that my home church seemed to have grown alongside me. It has slowly been expanding its use of the church calendar. We have been in a rhythm of practicing the four weeks of Advent, Good Friday services, and now our inaugural Ash Wednesday service.
But why are we having an Ash Wednesday service, and why now? What about 2026 made my church change its mind on a church tradition that started in the seventh century?
In part, it’s practical. Previously, we didn’t have the facilities to meet on a school night (I am not sure we wanted to conduct a service of lament during parent-teacher conferences), and when we finally moved into a more suitable school building a few years ago, the pandemic hit.
Beyond that, I talked with one of our elders, Nathan Potter, about the conversations among leaders that led to our reclaiming the church calendar. He said it has been in the works for a few years as our elders have observed the needs of our congregation.
The American church is contending for unity amid bitterly divided election cycles, fighting for contentment and joy in the midst of a culture obsessed with consumption, and trying to point our minds toward Christ in a world inundated with social media and other distractions, Potter said. Our elders saw how the spiritual needs of our congregation were tied to the unstable ways of the earthly city.
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“We started talking about leaning into the church calendar as an anchoring rhythm in contrast to whatever is going on in the world,” Potter told me. “We are remembering the story of God, that we are a part of something that goes back before the United States, before the current news cycle, before our country was founded, and even before the country that founded our country was founded. Our earnest prayer is that this stabilizes our congregation and how we conceptualize the world and the story God is writing.”
The Ash Wednesday service is partly an answer to questions about how to “counterprogram American individualism,” he said. “Let’s form our people to think in common unity, and that will have a downstream effect on a lot of things.”
The church calendar is an opportunity for reorientation toward the larger story of God’s creation and his people, a stable pattern of faith to hold on to in an age when we are confronted daily with how little control we have over natural disasters, politics, and governments—not to mention our mental health or strained family and friend relationships. This liturgical rhythm reminds us of God’s providence in chaos, his presence as calm in raging storms.
Ash Wednesday reminds us of our need to repent, both personally and corporately. And as part of the global church observing the liturgical calendar, we do so in the good and grand company of sinners turned saints, rescued by Christ.
“The idea of being more connected to the global church—and that we are doing this with Christians throughout time and space—is bigger than our congregation,” Potter said. “It brings our own awareness that this is so much bigger than us.”
Mia Staub is editorial project manager at Christianity Today.
The post Late to a 1,400-Year-Old Church Tradition? Me Too. appeared first on Christianity Today.
