We worship on a Sunday because it’s fitting to do so: not only are we celebrating the resurrection, but we are stepping into a new creation. The Church is the clearest breaking in of the new age into this dying world. Sunday worship is a model for new creation living.

There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we should continue to keep the Sabbath, but now on a Sunday, or whether we should keep Sunday, but as the Lord’s Day—more a matter of invitation to worship than strict rules about rest—or not really care at all and enjoy all seven days for work, rest, and worship as the mood takes us.

I take the middle position and will be arguing from it, but the question I’d like to tackle is ‘why do we worship on Sundays?’

Perhaps it’s never occurred to you, but it arises because Saturday, as the seventh day of the week, was the Sabbath kept by the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. As Christianity arose from Judaism, some Christians kept the Sabbath—you can read the debates about whether this should be normative or not through the New Testament, but especially in Galatians—but all Christians worshipped on the first day of the week (Acts 20, 1 Corinthians 16, the Didache).

One of the reasons this catches us out is because we don’t think of Sunday as the first day of the week. It is, most likely, the seventh day in the calendar on your phone, the ‘weekend’ so clearly at the end of the week. This orientation of our lives around work rather than around worship is a sign of our post-Christianity. We should start the week with the Lord.

Why the shift?

The New Testament isn’t explicit about this; it just narrates what Christians did. As best we can tell from documentary sources, this is then what they always did. What was the logic they were using?

They were focusing on two things:

The resurrection changed everything.

Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday. We focus on the cross in our worship, and generally that is good and right, but Christians didn’t choose to meet on a Friday. We have a resurrection faith. We worship because Jesus rose from the dead. The resurrection isn’t just a proof that the atonement worked, it’s the moment that the second thing we’re focusing on happened:

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