This may seem like a curious question. The answer should be obvious, right? It’s “Ash Wednesday,” so of course ashes would be part of the service!
For some United Methodists alive today and all of our predecessor denominations, not only was it a question whether ashes were part of Ash Wednesday, it was a question whether Ash Wednesday, or Lent for that matter, was an expectation of Methodist or Evangelical United Brethren local churches.
Why this is the case takes us back to John Wesley, a priest in the Church of England. While its Book of Common Prayer (1662)included a service of penitence and confession of sin on what it called "The First Day of Lent," the influence of the Calvinist wing of the church led to the omission of an imposition of ashes as part of the ritual for that day.
In 1784, John Wesley developed The Sunday Service of Methodists in North America. The Sunday Service is Wesley’s edited and abridged version of The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (1662). He intended it to be the official book of worship for the soon-to-launch Methodist Episcopal Church (also 1784).
If you look at the calendar Wesley provided for early American Methodists to use for the Christian Year, you will find no mention of Ash Wednesday, The First Day of Lent, or Lent at all. Instead, he extended “Sundays after Christmas” until two Sundays prior to Easter (See page 43 of the linked version above).
Wesley did not say why he omitted the First Day of Lent and Lent entirely. We might infer from his introduction to The Sunday Service that this may have fallen under his stated rubric that “Most of the holy-days (so-called) are omitted, as at present serving no valuable end.” While the value for American Methodists of observing, for example, the Feast of St. Machutus each November 15 was certainly questionable, why get rid of the First Day of Lent and all of Lent?
If Wesley omitted The First Day of Lent and all of Lent because he believed they served no present purpose, it may have been because Methodism had its own ongoing, and perhaps in Wesley’s mind, superior process for confessing sin (band meetings and Watch Nights) and its own means of preparing and supporting people to live the Christian life (the trial bands, the class meetings, and the society meetings). Why limit serious confession of sin to a single day or the formation as Christians to a few weeks each year when Methodists had other means to do this work all year long?
Ash Wednesday and Lent continued to be absent from denominational hymnals throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century for both American Methodists and their German-speaking cousins in the Evangelical Association and the United Brethren in Christ. It was not until the 1935/1939 Methodist Hymnal that American Methodists mentioned Ash Wednesday or Lent, though without any resources for either. The Book of Worship for Church and Home (1945) was the first official Methodist resource to provide a worship order and additional “worship aids” for the Sundays in Lent. Though it listed Ash Wednesday, it provided no ritual for it. The Hymnal of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (1957) made no mention of Ash Wednesday or Lent. The 1966 edition of The Methodist Book of Worship for Church and Home was the first to provide a service order for Ash Wednesday. Yet, despite its title, that worship order followed the older Anglican practice of a service of penitence without an imposition of ashes.
The United Methodist Book of Worship (1992) was the first official ritual resource of The United Methodist Church to include a full service for Ash Wednesday that included the use of ashes. Still, it should be noted, the imposition of ashes was left optional via a rubric stating, “If there is to be no Imposition of Ashes, the service continues with Confession and Pardon.”
Why?
That The Sunday Service and subsequent hymnals had omitted Ash Wednesday and Lent gave many American Methodists no precedent for observing either. Without such precedent, and surrounded in many places by other Christians that also had no tradition of observing either (notably many Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists), Methodists could develop some reticence toward these observances because of their more general unfamiliarity in many local settings.
But the cause for reticence in observing Ash Wednesday with ashes, was more, I think, than a lack of precedent. It also suggests a deep-seated anti-Catholicism among American Methodists and other Protestants which led Methodists and other Protestants observing an Ash Wednesday service to do so without imposing ashes well into the 1970s. During my thirteen years as this denomination’s director of worship resources (2005-2018), I regularly heard from laity and some clergy that such practices as imposing ashes or observing the Church Year or celebrating communion weekly or using the Revised Common Lectionary to provide the scripture readings for Sunday worship were “too Catholic.” As United Methodists and others of the Methodist family worldwide continue to develop constructive dialog with the Catholic Church, I hope that reticence about such practices being "too Catholic" and the anti-Catholic sentiment behind that phrase will wane.
It is true that the practice of imposing ashes began in the Catholic Church around the 11th century. Ash Wednesday has never been practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Churches. In the Reformation, Lutherans continued the practice. Anglicans, as noted, continued a highly penitential gathering on that day without ashes. Calvinists, Zwinglians and Mennonites did not continue it at all, some of them because they viewed such practices as "too Catholic." John Wesley, an Anglican priest, discontinued the First Day of Lent and Lent entirely as he developed the worship resources for the Methodist Episcopal Church because he thought Methodists at the time had no need of them, not because they were “too Catholic.”
Today, however, United Methodists can no longer claim they have no need of Ash Wednesday and Lent. The structures for confessing sin and forming Christians that were the hallmark of early Methodism are mostly defunct and have been for a long time. Participation in class meetings became optional in white American Methodism as of 1848, North and South. Bands had already died out for the most part well before then. While Ash Wednesday, with ashes, is not a one for one replacement for those lost practices, is it a powerful, visceral reminder of our mortality and sinfulness, of our need for God’s redeeming grace, and of our common struggle with the powers of sin and death together with all Christians. It is tangible in ways that ashless services are not.
So this year, if you haven’t before, and even though the ritual of the church does not require it, consider using the full ritual for Ash Wednesday, with the imposition of ashes and Holy Communion.
Burton Edwards serves as Lead with Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications. He previously served as director of worship resources with Discipleship Ministries from 2005-2018.
