The posting of “The Puritan’s Hourglass” (our weekly Sabbath lessons) may be found on the website as well as on Facebook, YouTube, GodTube, iTunes, & Google Play
The Saturday-Evening / Sunday-Morning Service
Our Saturday-evening service opens the Sabbath (as “the Sabbath day”—according to Genesis 1:5)—begins at sundown on the day prior and lasts until the next sundown[1] and, in a nod to our church history, meets as a “conventicle”[2] either in a “house-church” or at lakeside or even “under the stars.”
The Saturday-evening service begins with the pastor making his pubic confession of sin before the Elders (and before whoever else might come), is followed by his “teaching” through difficult points of the next morning’s lesson, provides the opportunity for thoughtful exchange between the pastor and members of the Assembly, and concludes with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in a closed communion.[3]
Our Sunday-morning worship service is devoted to prayer, bold preaching, and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in an open communion.
Lessons delivered at the Saturday-evening service and at the Sunday-morning service are generally on the Wednesday following. This allows time for Dr. Sovík to add footnotes and sources to the online text and allows time for the TOTS to edit and upload.
The Sabbath Service
The Sabbath lesson—the bulk of the worship service—is of considerable length;[4] it is given to instruct the hearer and to give application to the Word of God. Often foreboding, it is, above all, meant to effect man’s behavior by bringing the sinner to conviction, repentance, and change.
In the Puritan Assembly of former times, far more attention was given to Almighty God—on a single Sabbath—than many of us will give to our Heavenly Father between Christmas and Easter, and then again between Easter and the next Christmas.
It was not uncommon for the Puritan minister to ascend the pulpit to begin the Sabbath with a prayer that may have extended the full hour, which was then followed by a lesson of perhaps two turns of the hourglass, which was then continued in the minister’s return to the pulpit for a second service, and continued yet again in a third service!
Unlike the Catholic, we are not bound by the 8-minute sermon so that we can be “out the door” and off to the lake in a timely manner—shortening the Lord’s “Day” to the Lord’s “one hour.”² We are, however, constrained by custom, with today’s worshiper not able to endure a service of more than an hour.
We begin with 12 topical lessons to lay the foundation for future study, touching upon such various and sundry topics as “time,” history, the calendar, the Church and her denominations, faith, discipline, obedience, Pilgrims, Puritans, the Beginnings and the End Times, etc.
We will end the year with a Christmas lesson, addressing the subterfuge, myth, invention, and absurdity we’ve been taught as “Biblical.”
And then we will begin the new year with first part of our multi-part series, On the Mischance of an Adulterous Wife—the focus of our primary external ministry.
Check the Calendar for the lesson topic and to confirm the time and location.
Audio files of the lesson and text-transcriptions (with mouseover pop-ups showing the text of verses and with and extensive footnotes and sources) are available for download to your laptop, CD, flash drive, or cell phone. To access past lessons and topics, please visit the Archive on this website.
The Particular Days of Fellowship
Although we do not celebrate “holy days” as practiced by the Catholic and the Anglican, we gather for fellowship on twelve Particular Days of Fellowship and three Particular Days of Civil Religion[6]—augmented by “date specific” fellowship dinners of (e.g.,) roast goose with blackberry dumplings (Michaelmas), dark bread, ale, and root vegetables (Reformation Eve), sausage and carnival cakes (Wurstessen), etc.
Check the Calendar for the food offering and to confirm the time and location.
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[1] The Puritan-Calvinists at First Puritan are Sabbatarians, observing the entire Sabbath—from sundown on Saturday until sundown on Sunday.
[2] In the time of the English Puritan, a “conventicle” was an unlawful and secret gathering of the larger Assembly. It often met in the form of a “house church,” thought to be subversive to “order in the realm” and prohibited by an English government that sought to force everyone to worship either as a Catholic or as a Non-Separatist Anglican (depending on which group held the throne). Emphasizing prayer and the reading and unfolding of Scripture, with its application to the lives of those present, it was the “small-enough” vehicle by which the Puritan matured in Christian faith. In short, the 17th-century “conventicle” was a church at the polar end of the impersonal mega-church or even the typical brick-and-mortar church of the 21st century—with the conventicle meeting in secret under the authority of Scripture (For where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them, Matthew 18:20), gathering together either “under the stars,” at lakeside, in a barn, or in the home of a local noble or estate holder.
While we have not (yet) returned to a time when we must stand guard with our muskets lest “the government” imprison us for our faith—and while many of today’s ministers don’t have the courage or the voice and while many of today’s pew-sitters would not tolerate such an inconvenience—we find it to be useful to have the occasional lesson preached “in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8) or “under the stars” or at lakeside, with the minister speaking to adults sitting in lawn chairs or on blankets and to children occupying themselves with tadpoles or fireflies.
[3] In a closed communion, participation is generally limited to members in good standing within that particular denomination or assembly; in a close communion, those invited to participate are generally members of denominations and churches holding similar beliefs as the host church; an open communion, everyone—believers, unbelievers, as well as those living in a state of adultery and other sin—is welcome to share in the Lord’s Supper.
One of the earliest traditions of the Christian Church—as early as the first century—divided the worship service into two: everyone was welcome in the first while the second was restricted to believers. Just before the Assembly would recite the creed of faith, the priest would—and still does in some of the denominations—call out “The doors, the doors!” as a signal for the catechumens—those converted to Christianity but still under instruction and not yet committed by Baptism—to depart into another room for further instruction while the professed Christians remained for the Creed and the mystery of the Lord’s Supper.
Originally—unlike today—unbelievers, unknowns, and public sinners were simply not permitted the privilege of simply strutting down the aisle to participate in the Lord’s Supper.
[4] “It is recorded of Rev. Urian Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his sermons [preaching into a 5th hour]. The warning legend, ‘Be Short,’ which Cotton Mather³ inscribed over his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and preached for an hour and three quarters. . . . [and] Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, “Wee have a strong weakness in New England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: we make many ends before we make an end.”Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), “The Length of the Service,” in The Sabbath in Puritan New England (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 79.
Earle was a New England antiquarian and social historian of the Puritans who authored an extensive series of books on such wide-ranging topics as China Collecting in America (1892), Home Life in Colonial Days (1893), Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896), Stagecoach and Tavern Days (1900), and Old Time Gardens (1901). Her works provide a window to the former era by recording small pieces of “unessential” information that would otherwise be lost to history.
“The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious, and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not received in it their full due, their full money’s worth. . . . Indeed, when Rev. Samuel Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed for two hours without stopping, upon a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished that the prayer had been much longer.”
Alice Morse Earle, “The Length of the Service,” in The Sabbath in Puritan New England (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 81.
[5] Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a prolific Harvard-educated New England minister who authored over 450 works. In addition to his primary focus on theology, he is remembered for his writings on history, corn hybridization, and inoculation against infectious diseases. Mather is remembered, as well, for his role in the Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693) and for his defense of the same in his The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), and for his account of crime in the Colonies: Pillars of salt. An history of some criminals executed in this land, for capital crimes, With some of their dying speeches; collected and published, for the warning of such as live in destructive courses of ungodliness, Whereto is added, for the better improvement of this history, a brief discourse about the dreadful justice of God, in punishing of sin, with sin (1699).
[6] Our “Fellowship Calendar” follows the Creation of the world until its coming rebirth: Michaelmas (“The Day of Good and Evil,” 29 September), Creation Eve (“The Day of Dirt and Apple,” 22 October), Reformation Eve (31 October), Mayflower Day (11 September), Advent Sunday (the 4th Sunday before Christmas Day), Shepherds’ Eve (with the burning of our transgressors, 24 December), Three Kings’ Day (with the chalking of doors, 6 January), the Day of Ashes (40 days before Resurrection Sunday), Wurstessen (the “Affair of the Sausages,” 9 March), Maundy Thursday and Resurrection Eve (calendar dependent), and, finally, the midsummer Bonfires’ Eve (remembering—with bonfires and baptisms according to the ancient tradition—John the Baptist, meeting on the half-year before the coming of the “Light of the World,” roughly coinciding with the summer and winter solstices). We also gather (with food and fellowship) on three Particular Days of Civil Religion: Commencement Sunday, Training Sunday, and Election Sunday—the Sundays before the New Year, Independence Day, and the day of general elections.