A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols

The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was first held on Christmas Eve 1918. It was created by Eric Milner-White, who, at the age of thirty-four, had just been appointed Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, after experience as an army chaplain which had convinced him that the Church of England needed more imaginative worship. (He devised the College’s Advent Carol Service in 1934, and was a liturgical pioneer and authority during his twenty-two years as Dean of York.)

A revision of the Order of Service was made in 1919, involving rearrangement of the lessons, and from that date the service has always begun with the hymn ‘Once in royal David’s city’. The backbone of the service, the lessons and the prayers, has remained virtually unchanged. The original service was, in fact, adapted from an Order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the wooden shed, which then served as his cathedral in Truro, at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1880.

Wherever the service is heard and however it is adapted, whether the music is provided by choir or congregation, the pattern and strength of the service, as Dean Milner-White pointed out, derive from the lessons and not the music: “The main theme is the development of the loving purposes of God …” seen “through the windows and the words of the Bible.” Local interests appear, as they do here, in the Bidding Prayer; and personal circumstances give point to different parts of the service. Many of those who took part in the first service must have recalled those killed in the Great War of 1914-1918 when it came to the famous passage “all those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light.” The center of the service is still found by those who “go in heart and mind” and who consent to follow where the story leads.

Host or Publisher Saint Mark's Episcopal Cathedral