Jargon-busting: What's a Lectionary?

It's easy to use jargon in church. It sometimes feels that the church has to dream up a new word for every familiar idea or object, just to confuse people. Well, we want to remove the confusion where we can, so here's the first in a series of posts which aim to do the jargon-busting.

A lectionary is a book or list of bible readings for use in worship. (A lection is a reading). At our daily prayer services in the parish, and on the main services on Thursdays and Sundays, the lectionary provides the basis for the readings we use. Before the time of Jesus, the Hebrew scriptures were read in a cycle, with readings being appointed for various festivals and regular acts of worship. This practice continued in the early Church, and various schemes for selecting and organising readings have been developed through the centuries.

The strengths of a good lectionary are:

• the discipline of using readings which are pre-selected, rather than chosen arbitrarily or personal favourites.
  
• the sense of belonging to a wider church that comes from using the same readings as other Christian communities.
• the breadth and balance of readings which prevent reading from being too narrow.
  

The Church of England has adopted a version of the Revised Common Lectionary, and you can find an online version of it here but The Book of Common Prayer also has a lectionary of its own. The Revised Common Lectionary is used for Sunday readings (with minor variations) by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, as well as the Anglican Churches. It works through a three-year cycle.

We sometimes depart from the lectionary readings when we follow a series of thematic studies in our services, such as the recent series on "Christian Character". If you want to know what the lectionary readings are, it can be quite tricky to work them out from the 'master lectionary' on the Church of England website. That's because certain feasts and festivals displace the 'normal' lectionary provision. It's easier to find out what the lectionary readings are for a particular date in the year, by using one of the annually produced lectionary booklets like this or this.