Outdated and irrelevant tradition, or the perfect season for our modern age?
Every year, sometime between when hot cross buns unscrupulously appear in supermarkets and the eating of a chocolate egg, many of us catch a vague mention of “Lent”.
To many the word will sound ancient, dusty. Locked in books and church halls from another time.
For those of us who attend a mainline church, it will involve literal dust. Ashes marked on foreheads to remind us of our finite lives followed by a 40-day season of prayer, fasting (usually from chocolate) and giving to others.
But to put it down to just a list of duties to perform would be to undercut one of the most powerful and contemporary aspects of the season: intentional time to clarify and refocus our lives on what really matters.
And rarely has that felt more necessary.
We live in an age of relentless fragmentation. Our attention is no longer simply divided; it is actively hunted. Algorithms are engineered to keep us anxious, scrolling, comparing. Every app, advertisement and news cycle competes for a piece of us. We are invited to perform our identities, signal our values and consume our way to meaning all at once, all the time.
Nowhere is this divided loyalty more visible than in our relationship with material wealth. We accumulate position and possession, often not out of greed, but out of anxiety. Out of the quiet fear that we are not enough, that we do not have enough, that we must hold on to everything we can. Life becomes cluttered. Generosity becomes difficult. God recedes to the back of the queue.
The disciplines of prayer, fasting and generosity are a direct challenge to that condition. They loosen the grip of status anxiety. They relocate our identity not in what we own or achieve, but in our relationship with God and with the people around us. They give us back what the algorithms are stealing from us: attention and focus.
This is why Lent is not a relic. It is a rescue.
Lent is the 40-day period leading up to Easter, a season the Church has observed for nearly two thousand years. Forty days echoes the time Jesus spent in the wilderness before his public ministry began. Hungry, tested and stripped of comfort, prayer and fasting didn’t diminish him. They clarified him. He knew who he was and what he was for.
So we follow in those footsteps.
The season of Lent has always been marked by three practices: fasting, prayer and almsgiving. Three disciplines that together orient the Christian life not just inward, but outward.
The logic is simple, but radical. When you fast, you create space, in your body, in your budget, in your attention. The tradition has always said: don’t leave that space empty. Fill it with something that matters. Feed someone. Clothe someone. Build something that lasts.
Right now, that call has a particular urgency.
Climate change is not an abstract future problem; it is an unfolding catastrophe for the world’s most vulnerable people. Harvests are failing. Coastlines are disappearing. Families across the Pacific, Asia and Africa are being forced from their homes and their livelihoods, not because of choices they made, but because of choices the wealthiest nations made for them.
The injustice is stark: those who contributed least to this crisis are suffering the most. And they have the fewest resources to adapt.
This is precisely the kind of moment that calls us back to the traditions of Lent: not to retreat into private spiritual exercise, but to look outward, let our hearts be moved, and ask: what am I willing to give?
Lent Event
Since 2004, UnitingWorld has been inviting Australian Christians to make Lent a season of outward action through Lent Event and, for 2026, the call is as urgent as it’s ever been.
Lent Event is built around a simple, powerful idea: that the Lenten practices of prayer, fasting and generosity can be channeled toward the lives of our global neighbours.
This year, the heart of Lent Event is 40 for the Future: a climate challenge for individuals, families, and whole congregations to live more simply during Lent and raise funds for UnitingWorld’s life-changing projects.
From helping families in Timor-Leste to grow their own food gardens, to planting trees in Indonesia to stabilise landslide-prone hillsides, to stocking evacuation centres in disaster-prone parts of the Pacific, every dollar raised goes to community-led climate action in places that need it most (see the impact your fundraising can have!).
And it’s not just about the money. Lent Event is a way for your church community to walk through the season together, with shared stories, prayers, and reflective resources each week that connect the ancient rhythms of Lent to the urgent realities of our world right now.
This year, consider what it might look like to let Lent be bigger. To let the ashes on your forehead be a reminder not just of your own mortality, but of the millions of people whose lives are being shaped by forces beyond their control, and of the power that ordinary people of faith have to change that.
Don’t just give up chocolate. Give your prayers, fasting and generosity to shape a fairer world for all.
Join us for Lent Event 2026 and sign up for 40 For the Future!
Lent Event 2026 runs 18 February – 2 April.
Top photo: A woman in Timor-Leste waters her raised food garden made possible thanks to UnitingWorld supporters.
UnitingWorld’s work in Timor-Leste is partly funded by the Australian Government as part of the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP).
