Nine Lessons and Carols needs to be long

The carol service that take time to pull at the golden thread of Christmas.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Choristers stand and sing in choir stalls in a church

BBC.

I have decided that I will make it an annual ritual to grumpily defend a Christmas tradition that I love. Last year it was the traditional Nativity Play. This year it is the traditional carol service. For over a hundred years, at King’s College Chapel at least, the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has borne witness to the very best of Anglican liturgy. The service combines candlelight, communal and choir carol singing, and lessons from Holy Scripture in a beautifully evocative manner. I adore the service, and it is very much a highlight of my Advent contemplation.

I am thrilled to say that carol services seem to be as popular as ever! I can hardly name a church that won’t be putting one on, either solo or uniting with other parishes. This warms my heart…and yet a shard of ice remains. A small, but very important gripe: editing. I notice that many services don’t follow the traditional pattern of nine lessons. Some have six. Some five. Some only a few, focusing as much as possible on the carol singing. I have a few clergy friends who enjoy giving me a gentle ribbing when I tell them my plans: “Oh you’re not doing ALL NINE are you!? Oh dear! It’ll be so long!”

Brevity can be a virtue, and the Church hasn’t always cultivated it. I understand people have busy lives, and that very few of us want to be out late on a cold, wintry evening. I know that mince pies and mulled wine are as close to an irresistible temptation as there could be. I know that 30 to 45 minutes of hymn singing with a bit of Bible seems so lovely and compact. I understand all of this.

However, I want to argue in favour of keeping all nine lessons: the length is the point!

We end with a meditation on primordial concepts that cannot be truly comprehended by any mortal, and can only be put to paper in poetry.

Some of the lessons are long (I’m looking at you Genesis!), and some a wonderfully pithy. It starts at the very beginning of the Bible and spends a good deal of time – nearly half of the readings – meditating on Genesis and Isaiah before we even begin to get to the baby Jesus, and the manger, and the shepherds, and the wise men. We seem to take ages not actually reading about the Story of Christmas…and this is VITAL!

The traditional carol service concludes with the Prologue of John, that masterful exposition of the theology of the Incarnation, the perfect encapsulation of what a Christian believes is the truth, and the light, and the meaning of Jesus being born in a stable in Bethlehem. The service concludes with mention of the Word, of pre-existence, of Creation, of light defeating darkness, of salvation wrought through spirit and not flesh. We end with a meditation on primordial concepts that cannot be truly comprehended by any mortal, and can only be put to paper in poetry…and yet this is the true meaning of Christmas, and the true meaning of the Scriptures. Everything from Genesis 1.1 has been leading up to this, and everything written in Scripture only makes sense in light of these remarkable verses by John (or so Christians believe).

When defending the traditional Nativity, I wrote about narrative and story and how they are fundamental to understanding our place in the world and the very meaning of our lives. The same can be said about the full nine lessons. Starting at the Fall of Mankind in the Garden of Eden, stopping to ponder the mercy and promise of God to Abraham and Isaac, being confronted with the wonderful Prophecies of Isaiah (the promise of peace and joy in the Kingdom of God), and then charting the story of the miraculous Birth of Christ, we see the underlying narrative thread of all Scripture: God loves His creation, God makes a promise to His creation, God keeps His promise and brings salvation and reconciliation to His creation. The Christmas story is wonderful and joyous, but it is an act in a larger drama, and we cannot truly understand it (or how it relates to the Prologue of John) if we don’t allow ourselves to encounter the whole story.

Perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis and expectation on a single service in the year. Carol Services are celebratory, and anything that makes them accessible to as many people as possible is not something I want to malign…but…I pray that the full sweep of Scripture, the full and precious golden thread of the narrative of Scripture, is not lost. It is the meaning of Christmas, and it is the meaning of life, and it fills me with joy when it is celebrated with fellowship, singing, and worship.

Anyway, grump over. I’m going to eat a mince pie.

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Review

Belief

Books

Culture

28 May 2025

4 min read

Could Lamorna Ash become a Christian in a year?

Moving, funny and beautifully written, this young writer’s quest for faith has lessons for all of us.

Lucy Denyer

Lucy is a writer and editor.

Lamorna Ash.

When two of Lamorna Ash’s university friends decided to leave behind their lives as standup comedians and train to become priests, Ash was fascinated. She interviewed them and wrote an essay about it for the Guardian but, by the time her piece came out, knew she was “not finished with Christianity.”

“Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts… would have some cumulative effect on me,” she writes. “Through these encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back. I couldn’t see what was going on behind it, but I understood it was there for them… they taught me how to believe in the belief of others… their stories became the starting point.”

And so Ash bought a second hand Toyota Corolla, stocked the glove box with CDs and set off on a Christian road-trip around the country that started with a Christianity Explored course and ended with a series of meetings with people who were consciously ‘dechurching’, taking in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Quakers, Anabaptists and a YWAM community along the way. She books in ‘desert times’ on Iona; in Walsingham; at a silent Jesuit retreat. She walks, and talks, and tries to pray and thinks. Throughout her travels, Ash carried a ‘jokey’ question in the back of her mind to frame her research: could she become a Christian in a year?

The result of her quest is this book: tender, fascinating, moving, funny and beautifully written. Throughout my reading of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever I kept thinking of people I would like to give it to, Christian and non-Christian alike. Ash has achieved a remarkable feat: to make faith and its pursuit a compelling subject regardless of whether you’re a believer or not.

Primarily, this is because she has not - joke question aside - set out with an agenda, other than to more fully understand what makes believers tick (and, she admits, because it is something to write about). Though she is scathing about Rico Tice, whom she finds performative and evasive, and finds the dogma of the Christianity Explored course too rigid and inflexible for her liking, she is sympathetic towards and interested in her fellow Christianity Explored small group companions - and is self-aware enough to admit that during this time she “played the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”. Though she finds the intensity of Youth With A Mission’s community - along with the fact that many of the staff are married to each other - a bit much, she is individually drawn to some of the people who work there, and reflective about what and why they’re doing. As someone who has grown up with faith, it is fascinating to see what we often take for granted held up to scrutiny by someone who is not there to be deliberately combative, but to try and understand.

“I am still too close to it to tell you definitively all the ways the encounters… changed me,” Ash writes. “What it felt like at the time, though, was that each conversation was leading me to places in my own mind I had never visited before.”

There are elements of Ash’s book I am intrigued by, but sceptical of: her suggestion, for example, that the Bible should not stop where it does, but might be continually added to, “like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity.” Her theological understanding is not, perhaps understandably, advanced. She is a self-confessed product of her era: young, progressive, queer, and her readings of and understandings of other people are framed through that lens.

But despite its failings, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever remains compelling because of its curiosity - a curiosity that Ash wonders might be the place “where God exists”; its attempts, however stumbling, to understand faith rather than just dismiss it. It is an atheist Quaker who teaches Ash “how I might approach Christianity: it was supposed to be a challenge.” You will have to read it to learn where Ash herself ends up, but her book extends the challenge to those of us who might benefit from a similar scrutiny of what we believe - not to fall out of faith, but also to understand it, and God, more.

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