A Feast Day for the Whole Church

excerpts from an article by Steve Thorngate

in the September 2026 issue of The Christian Century

This Spring, the Consultation on Common Texts published an update to the Revised Common Lectionary.  It added the Feast of Creation in Christ on September 1st, offering biblical texts and other material  for use starting with the current church year.  It’s a milestone in a decades-long ecumenical process.  In 1989, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople issued an invitation to “the whole Christian world” to join the Orthodox in observing September 1st – known in the Eastern Church as the Feast of the Indiction – as a day of prayer for creation.   Over time, this day of prayer was adopted by various churches and ecumenical groups as Creation Day, along with a companion Season of Creation spanning September and early October.

In 2024, a group of church leaders and scholars began a series of meetings in Assisi, Italy, about the prospect of the whole Christian world joining the Orthodox in elevating September 1st to the status of an official feast day.   Along with CCT, the project’s steering committee included the World Council of Churches, the Middle East Council of Churches, and several world communions. The fruit of their efforts – a proposal for the Feast of Creation in Christ – would be the first time the Western Church adopted an Eastern feast in more than 500 years.

Liturgical theologian Kimberly Belcher participated in the Feast of Creation meetings in Assisi.  She teaches at the University of Notre Dame, represents the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in ecumenical dialogues, and is coauthor of One Baptism – One Church?  She spoke to The Christian Century in June.

Tell us a little about the history of the Feast of Creation.

The Eastern Orthodox feast on September 1st has origins in the civic calendar of ancient Rome.  This was a harvest festival, considered the beginning of the agricultural and imperial year, and the Orthodox feast commemorates the beginning of God’s creation and of Christ’s ministry as well.  The feast also has a historical connection to Rosh Hashanah and to the Jewish understanding of the harvest season as the beginning of the created order.

Its official name was and  remains the Feast of the Indiction.  But creation is one of the themes of that historical celebration, and most of the Eastern Orthodox Churches now consider it the Feast of Creation.

What was the process like for developing this proposal?

The consultation has been going on for years, and it culminated in three big meetings in Assisi.  The first one, which I participated in only online, was in March 2024. The second one was a Catholic consultation, because we have all these nitty-gritty types of questions that other churches don’t have to answer,  in December 2024.  And then the last one was in May 2025.  For each meeting there were dozens of scholars doing preparatory work on biblical foundation, liturgical foundations, theological meaning, and more.

It was a pretty broadly ecumenical group that was represented there, everyone from the Copts to the Pentecostals.  What were the challenges and gifts of this diversity?

We’ve never really tried to do this before, to discern together what makes a feast worth celebrating.   Every time you try to do something new together as a community, you’re trying to build off a shared experience.  In a situation where there’s a gap of recognized shared experience, you have to make up  for that with an openness of heart.  To me, this was the real gift of the meeting.   The more diversity there is, the more there’s a call for this Christian openness toward the neighbor.

Major Heather Poxon was there, representing the Salvation Army. At one point she said something like, I’m a member of a nonliturgical church, and I don’t know what it means for us to adopt a feast day.  But I am happy to be here, and I’m excited to see what this means for our community.

The full title the group settled on is the Feast of the Creation in Christ.  Why is this Christological focus important?

In the second half of the 20th century, as the Western Church was evaluating and reforming the Christian calendar we inherited, a distinction was made between the feasts about the lives and witness of individual saints and the feasts about Christ’s work to save us.   The latter group, the feasts of Christ, sometimes are thought to have a universal character, whereas a lot of times the work of an individual saint is something that speaks especially to people who are like that saint in some way.

So one thing that this feast title does is to identify Christ in the act of creation as already the Word, the Logos – the principle or Archetype of creation – and the one in whom all of creation has its meaning and existence.   And as a feast of Christ, it reminds us that the creation marks the beginning of God's work to save us. Before the Fall, our salvation  was already real in the mind of God.

To be clear, there are many churches in which the title we chose is not especially helpful or meaningfully grounded in practice – churches in which keeping the title Creation Day makes more sense than, say, trying to explain what a liturgical feast is.  As somebody who does a lot of work in ecumenism, one critique I often hear is that ecumenism isn’t real – because while we may use the same words, we mean different things.   But the conversation in Assisi about the name of the feast neatly inverted this concern.  We found that we had  a lot of agreement about the content of the feast – about creation as the initiation of God’s will to save us, even as the thing that reveals to us that God wants to save us.  The theological consensus was deep and thick.  At the same time, different communities are formed by different types of language, and in those communities, there are different types of misunderstandings available.  So we need different words.

The title Feast of Creation in Christ is a kind of suggestion of a core set of terms for the feast.  It comes with explicit permission to be flexible in different contexts, using the kind of language that’s going to help your community to understand what the day is about.

The materials I’ve seen from Assisi also stress the mystery of creation.  Why that particular emphasis?

That’s one way we experimented with shifting  away from just celebration and thanksgiving for creation – or, on the other hand, just lament and intercession – to seeing creation itself as a kind of revelation, as already showing us something about the nature of God.

One thing that grounded our work was the way creation is built into the structure of the Nicene Creed:  the Father identified as creator, the Word as the one through whom all things were made, the Holy Spirit who gives life to all creatures. The mystery of the Trinity is already revealed to us in creation, as it is illuminated by the Holy Spirit and the Christian tradition.

The Season of Creation was established by the World Council of Churches more than 20 years ago, and it might be more familiar to some Western Chritians than the September 1st tradition is.   But there are plenty of churches that don’t observe either one.   Do you think the development of an ecumenical feast will help to promote the longer season in the churches as well?

It’s a good question.  The Season of Creation serves as a bridge between Creation Day on September 1st and the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi on October 4th.  And yes, I do think that when we come to see the Feast of Creation as an anchor, a wider adopting of the season will follow.   I know from my work with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship that a lot of communities are coming up with whole lectionaries for the Season of Creation.  That’s the kind of thing that can be adapted and adopted in a free church setting – something that I can’t do at my local Catholic parish.  This is an ecumenical process, and different churches with their different structures have different gifts to offer.

And Saint Francis and his feast day are ecumenically very popular!   I’ve always found it delightful, if also slightly puzzling, that there is this Italian religious founder who everybody loves.