All Saints' Day Liturgy and Prayers: Two Options for Your Church

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a Protestant pastor, you approach All Saints’ Day with a little unease. After all, because Protestant churches tend not to have a special class of canonized exemplars of the Christian life, we don’t use the word “saint” much, and when we do, it’s often to remind each other that we are all saints in the household of God. Further, the remembrance of the dead as saints can come uncomfortably close for some to the invocation or veneration of saints. And beyond these distinctive Protestant theological disagreements with our Catholic brothers and sisters, there is, at least in some western cultures, a tendency to avoid talking too much about death and the dead—and, at least in some cases—such a focus on the joy of faith as to seem to shun the side of faith that grapples with pain and loss.

Because of this, All Saints’ Day often goes unmarked in many Protestant communities. 

However, I want to suggest that there is a role for All Saints’ Day in Protestant churches that is both theologically sound and healthy for congregations. In fact, by doing so, you may meet needs in your congregation that remain unvoiced by your people.

To do this, I’m going to explore three things: our identity as saints, the importance of examples of saintliness, and how All Saints' Day can create space for grief—and offer two (free) examples, complete with prayers and responsive readings—to use or adapt in your own services.

Why Protestants Should Observe All Saints' Day

All Saints’ Day Challenges Us to Live Up to Our Calling

We Protestants like to emphasize that all Christians are saints. To be a saint is to be someone who is “sanctified,” set apart from the mundane and ordinary for God. Paul often addresses the believers in the churches he is writing to “saints” (see Eph. 1:1, Col. 1:2, 1 Cor. 1:2). Our sainthood is connected with our inclusion in Christ, suggesting that from the greatest to the least of us who are in Christ, we are all saints—in a global community of saints.

This identity as saints matters. For one thing, to say that we are saints is to say that we are holy—set apart by God for himself. Our holiness, like our justification, does not come from what we do. It comes from what God did for us through Christ. 

But what we do matters. If you have something that is holy, you don’t roll it around in the dirt. You care for it carefully and treat it with respect for the sake of the one who made it holy. 

Just so with us. Our identity as saints calls for us to live pure lives, lives that honor the identity of saints that God has given us. If we are holy, then that has practical consequences: turning from sin, repenting, and doing the good works God has prepared for us to walk in. 

All Saints' Day is a perfect time to remind your congregation of this truth. We want to transform lives—which is more powerful: telling someone to live rightly because it's right, or telling someone to live rightly because it is your identity in Christ?

All Saints’ Day Allows Us to Highlight Inspiring Examples

While we may not canonize specific people as saints, we should recognize people who live lives of extraordinary sanctity—people who are good examples of what it means to live out our identities as saints. 

We need inspiration. We need examples. We need demonstrations that it is, as hard as it may seem, possible to succeed in holy living, even with the world trying to constantly derail us. All Saints' Day is a perfect occasion to elevate these examples. 

This is in large part, what the “hall of faith” in Hebrews 11 is doing, setting up that cloud of witnesses that inspire us to run the race we are called to.

Obvious examples are the apostles and prophets, as well as those canonized saints recognized by the Catholic church. There is much to admire in the life of St. Francis of Assissi, St. Anthony, St. Augustine, and St. Teresa of Avila, just to name a few. Our Christian imaginations are poorer if we don’t know their stories. But there are plenty of more recent examples of sanctity, from Eric Liddel to Corrie ten Boom, from C. S. Lewis to Billy Graham, from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr. And beyond these well-known people, what about those in our own communities who we know to have lived lives that inspire us to follow Jesus better and more fully than ever?

All Saints’ Day is the perfect occasion to turn our congregations’ eyes to these examples—to point them out, to celebrate them, and to encourage us to imitate them as they imitated Christ. 

All Saints’ Day Allows Us to Create Space for Grief

The “all” in All Saints’ Day is important. That “all” includes Christians across the world, but it also transcends the barrier of death to those who are “absent from the body” but “present with the Lord.” 

The pain of loss haunts many in your congregation. Even though we look forward to the resurrection, in the meantime our separation from Christians in death is a pain that goes unacknowledged too often in our services—and I worry sometimes that there is a pressure to pretend as if we are more joyful than we are in services that suggest that joy is the normal emotional set-point for Christians. That could be alienating for those who grieve.

All Saints’ Day allows us to create a healthier relationship with grief. If we create space for remembering people and acknowledging our grief—in the context of our future hope—we have an opportunity to be present with our brothers and sisters and remind them that they are not alone.

Liturgy Can Acknowledge and Teach All Three Truths

Preaching on these themes is fantastic, and I hope you do. But I want to suggest that liturgy is an indispensable part of bringing these truths before your congregation. The thing about liturgy is that it puts truths together for us to say—to enact or even re-enact. Our saying of the words together, feeling our way through them as a community, and participating in them as we speak goes deeper than reading them on a page. 

That's why we encourage you to find a way to work acknowledging our identity, inspiring examples of saintliness, and remembrance of the dead in Christ in your prayers on the Sunday following All Saints' Day.

Two Liturgies for Different Contexts

The Pastor's Workshop has two free liturgies with two approaches to observing All Saints' Day in your services. Both explicitly create space for naming the people and events on our hearts during the liturgy—bringing what matters to us into our community in prayer.

All Saints' Remembrance (Contemporary, Contemplative)

A service of remembrance for two voices created by Lisa Degrenia in 2021. Creates meditative space for grief, gratitude, and remembrance with contemporary language and optional symbolic actions.

Best for:

• Contemporary worship styles

• Churches new to observing All Saints' Day

• Emphasizing gratitude, grief, and memory.

• Meditative and contemplative tone.

• Integrating activities for remembrance.

Responsive Prayers for All Saints' Day

A set of responsive prayers addressing the sainthood of believers, the cloud of witnesses as inspiration, and remembering those who have gone before us. Designed especially to fit into a "prayers of the people," but adaptable for other places in a service.

Best for:

• Churches wanting Scripture-based prayers with theological depth

• Congregations familiar with responsive prayers

• Services emphasizing Christian identity and creating space for grief

• A reverent and thoughtful tone accessible for modern congregations.