| The Lectionary | | Date Created: Oct 31, 2005, 07:15 AM |
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The Lectionary was the Church's way of preventing there ever being a Lost Message or Secret Message of Jesus. Preachers and those in charge of the service locally could not merely read and preach on the passages they liked best. The Lectionary is essentially a list, assigning each Sunday in the calendar (and other major days) with a particular reading from the Gospels, one from the Epistles and some other readings and prayers (including the prayer called 'the Collect' originally intended to collect together ideas from the Epistle and Gospel reading to apply to the hearers). Through these assigned readings, the Church would read and pray through the whole of the New Testament over the course of two or three years.
It fell out of favour big time in modernity; preachers wanted to focus where they wanted to focus. So churches with leaders who thought of God as a vengeful judgemental guy could choose to always have those passages read and focussed on, while leaders who thought of God as a benign support for anything that anyone does could focus on and read those passages. And both could ignore anything that didn't fit their theology. "There's so much wonderful stuff in the Bible, why spend time on the other bits?" And parts of the message could get 'lost' to congregations who followed their local leader's tastes rather than regularly being exposed to the whole.
But some churches continued to use the Lectionary right through the dark age of modernity and continue to do so today. I've started a new category in the blog and I'll be writing about passages for the upcoming Sunday in the Lectionary my Church of England church uses, shared with some other denominations. My own denomination, the Lutherans, use a slightly different Lectionary, but I don't think there's any doctrinal issues at stake, so I'll go with the church I'm attending. |
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