Lessons and Carols

The Christmas season (and 2024) comes to an end with a special service of scripture and carols.

Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols: a Living Tradition

Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was first held on Christmas Eve, 1918. It was planned by Eric Milner-White, who at the age of 34 had just been appointed Dean of King’s. His experience as an army chaplain had convinced him that the Church of England needed more imaginative worship.

Although imaginative, the 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from one drawn up by the then Bishop of Truro, later Archbishop of Canterbury, E.W. Benson.  The first Truro service took place in 1880 in the large wooden structure affectionately known as a ‘shed’, which then served as Truro Cathedral. It wasn’t an afternoon service but took place at 10.00 pm, and was intended to draw people away from the teeming public houses. Archbishop Benson’s son, Arthur Benson, who studied at King’s and became Master of Magdalene College, recalled: “My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve—nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop.”

Other churches adapted the service for their own use as soon as they heard about it: King’s was by no means one of the earliest adopters. What made Milner-White’s appropriation so significant, however, was that he introduced it immediately after the end of the First World War and used it as an occasion to invite the city to fill a Chapel that would have been far too big for the much-decimated post-war College community. To mark the occasion, Milner-White added what he called a ‘Bidding Prayer’ to the service handed down from Truro.

It begins with a call to prayer and meditation that invites those who hear it to go ‘even unto Bethlehem’ in their imaginations. He calls all to make the Chapel ‘glad with our carols of praise’. Then he rightly and movingly urges the congregation to hold in prayer the many who then, as now, would be far from glad in their personal or shared suffering.

Finally, boldly and characteristically, he invites the whole company to extend their prayer for those who have passed on from this mortal life. In the congregation that day would have been many who had been bereaved by the violence of war and who recalled their own loved ones when it came to the sentence: And lastly let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light.

In 1928 the service was broadcast live on the wireless by the BBC and proved to be extremely popular. With the exception of 1930, it has been broadcast annually. The broadcasts have become part of Christmas for many who live far from Cambridge, England and is listened to by millions around the globe. The centre and meaning of that service is still found by those who as Milner-White intended, ‘go in heart and mind to Bethlehem’ and who follow the eternal story of the loving purposes of God, wherever it takes them.

excerpt from The Revd  Dr Stephen Cherry, Dean of the King’s Chapel brief history of the service