Crazy Lectionary Idea

[The Liturgist]

Hmm. One of my challenges here is that on the whole, my congregations vote with their feet... and show up in far greater numbers to Eucharistic services than to various other services. So I expect I would struggle to get much attendance to that kind of variety of formats.

So basically, my point in the above post is that the trick is you have to attach the two services and run them together without a break or interruption. Almost all Orthodox services are structured this way, but I have seen it work elsewhere. For example, a local Anglo Catholic parish, St. George’s, which you can Google, knowing my location, does evening prayer and a said Eucharist both from the 1928 American book on Wednesday night. That said evensong would not be happening if it were not for the said Eucharist that immediately follows. And since they are said, they are short. When services are bundled, abbreviations are commonly made.

What does not work, and I know this from dismal personal failure, is scheduling a random non-Eucharistic service for a random time of day, midweek, outside of a major metropolitan area (indeed, that’s kind of how half of the churches in the Square Mile of the City of London operate, only the other half do actually have a Eucharist, often at noon, for the office workers).

There is a local Episcopalian church that before the Pandemic had an inexplicable 9 AM Morning Prayer on Friday, but they are quite large. I had meant to go to see what kind of a crowd it attracted. But Las Vegas is a major metropolitan area, and services will work here which will not work in less populous areas. Also lots of people work on the weekend due to the tourism industry.

 

[The Liturgist]

The one thing I do like about the current novus ordo cycle is that we get a wider exposure to the Bible over three years. Well, the other is that the lectionary is used by several different groups so there are actually many kinds of Christians almost on the same page. Aside from those two things I wouldn’t mind going back to a one year lectionary.

I would need to learn more about this year D thing. Never heard of it before. I sort of like your idea. But does it mean that there would be some readings that would never be heard? Or that it all gets heard within four years?

I just realized that in places that practice Ascension Thursday Sunday they don’t get the Sunday reading of John 17 any time during the year. I know that’s a tangent but I just realized what I had been missing before I moved. My old diocese observed Ascension Thursday Sunday and my new diocese observes Ascension on Thursday.

That may be true in the Roman Rite, where the scripture lessons in the Vetus Ordo are at times quite brief, and where public celebration of the Divine Office has always been lacking, but in Anglicanism, an article in LiturgyCanada which I can try to find a link to if desired, from 1996, consisted of a study by a priest comparing the 1962 Canadian BCP (which coincidentally came out at the same time as the last major TLM revision), with the RCL, and he found that the RCL read dramatically less of each Gospel than the BCP Eucharistic lectionary, particularly of the Gospel of John, of which only 68% appears in the RCL. The disparity was heightened if one factored in the Divine Office lectionary.

Year D is a proposed fix to some of the defects of the RCL, and they are real defects, proposed by Rev. Slemmons, and he wrote up an excellent description and walkthrough of it explaining shortfalls of the RCL and his proposed lessons for Year D. You can buy it on Amazon Kindle or in print, inexpensively. Some of his lectionary choices are striking and unconventional, but then again, the Eastern Orthodox read John 1:1-17 at the Paschal Divine Liturgy (of course, an hour or so earlier they heard the shorter ending of Mark at Paschal Matins). However, the Western church using John 1:1-14 for Christmas Day, or Christmas Sunday, by itself, if one assumes that were the main service and not the vespers the night before, is pretty bold also.

As a joke I am tempted to propose a year E, which would be centered around the Gnostic scriptures omitted from the RCL. The Ecclesia Gnostica actually has a one year lectionary based on the Anglican lectionary that retains some canonical scripture, amusingly enough. I would like to meet their bishop; I have no problem with what he’s doing, because unlike some mainline pastors, he’s not reading the Gnostic psuedepigrapha in an ostensibly Nicene Christian church service. I am all for honesty, and frankly I wish his church would grow and absorb the dangerous neo-Gnostic groups present in some of the mainline churches. He also has good taste in vestments.

 

[The Liturgist]

Homily, sermon, preaching, lesson, reflection, address... whatever you want to call it... I'm not wanting to prepare four a week!

My dark secret is I don’t want to write one per week. If I could get away esclusively using excellent homilies and sermons written by the likes of St. Ephrem, St. Gregory Nazianzus and St. Chrysostom, and by the early reformers, and by John Wesley, and by some of the great Comgregationalist preachers of the 18th century like Jonathan Edwards (although not Sinners in the hands of an Angry God, but not everything he preached was like that), and especially, some of the really brilliant Anglican homilies from the 19th and 20th century, like those or Bishop Lightfoot, which have been collected in multiple volumes, I would do that.

The reason being, I feel that whatever I have to say has probably been said better.

Also, I would love to revive the lost art of the metrical homily (well, it still exists in Syriac). An entirely sung liturgy, with no spoken words, and an entirely said service, would pair off each other nicely.

 

[The Liturgist]

If it’s just a 5 minute commentary, 2 minutes of which are announcements, it’s no problem.

I never, ever, ever, do announcements after Matins or Vespers has started until the final Dismissal at the end of the Eucharistic service or Compline. The only thing that would make me do that would be if a parent and child got separated, or member became ill, or another incident occurred, which would warrant interrupting the liturgy and calling 911. Since this is a congregational church and I have ruling elders who sit in close proximity to me, the rule is I make an announcement if needed and one of them calls 911 (the phone number for emergency services in the US).

Wal-Mart developed an excellent program for missing child situations called Code Adam, and we attend public safety briefings by the police specifically for churches and do CPR training.

I helped resuscitate my friend Frank last summer, but sadly he had severe cancer and multiple organ failure and only lasted another day. Then his wife died unexpectedly a week later.

 

[Paidiske]

So basically, my point in the above post is that the trick is you have to attach the two services and run them together without a break or interruption.

I think that would not fly in most parishes here. The only place I've seen it done was college chapel, where morning prayer flowed straight into the Eucharist. And even then, it only worked because for ordinands attendance at morning prayer was compulsory, the Eucharist optional; but by the time we were in situ it was rare for any of us to leave halfway through.

What does not work, and I know this from dismal personal failure, is scheduling a random non-Eucharistic service for a random time of day, midweek, outside of a major metropolitan area

Perhaps? The first parish I worked in after I was ordained had morning prayer five mornings a week, and a decent little group who met to pray together and then chatted over coffee. In their case, it worked because of proximity to a university, and academics and students had the flexibility to be in church at 8:30am.

But - with four churches to look after - what I notice where I am now, is that the services which are morning prayer (because the priest is in one of the other four churches) show a marked drop in attendance.

 

[The Liturgist]

I think that would not fly in most parishes here. The only place I've seen it done was college chapel, where morning prayer flowed straight into the Eucharist. And even then, it only worked because for ordinands attendance at morning prayer was compulsory, the Eucharist optional; but by the time we were in situ it was rare for any of us to leave halfway through.

It is critical to control the length of the services. 1662 Anglican Morning Prayer takes 30 minutes without singing, and might be singable in 30 minutes, and a said service of Holy Communion can be done in 35 minutes.

Conveniently enough, morning and evening prayer in Rev. John Hunter’s Devotional Services are shorter, and The Matins I presently use takes an average of 20 minutes, and the main service takes an average of 50 minutes, 15 of which is theoretically due to my homily.* The Vespers I use on Sunday takes a reliable 20 minutes, because it consists of Phos Hilarion being sung followed by a Lucenarium, a reading of the Old Testament and the Magnificat. The main service tends to be 50 minutes also, and Compline takes 10 minutes, or 15 if I read a metrical homily. And some people arrive late and leave early. This is also the case in Orthodox churches. By the way, should you doubt the accuracy of my timing, look at the videos by the Prayer Book Society, or the recordings of Choral Vespers on the BBC.

Another key element is the services have to be seamless. So you don’t stop and say “We’re going to start the Holy Communion now,” or do anything to indicate one has ended and another has begun; there are dismissals in the liturgical texts, but these have to be read as if they are blessings. You’re a big fan, like me, of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigils, but did you know the music and litanies contained therein span Vespers, Compline, The Midnight Office, Matins, and Prime? All of those get abbreviated to the bare minimum; Rachmaninoff’s musical setting is a further abbreviation; usually the actual service is 90 minutes.

Perhaps? The first parish I worked in after I was ordained had morning prayer five mornings a week, and a decent little group who met to pray together and then chatted over coffee. In their case, it worked because of proximity to a university, and academics and students had the flexibility to be in church at 8:30am.

What made that work was you had them daily at a sane time. My failure was to have it only once a week, and at an inconvenient time (mid afternoon). Whoops.

But indeed, if you get a group of people in the church at the same time daily, that is known to work reliably, but it has to be a convenient time, like 8:30, and not when everyone is either at work or picking their kids up from school, on one day a week. When I moved the service back to 4:30 I got some attendees, but then we (my senior pastor and I) decided on an alternate schedule for midweek services which worked better. And then two years later he announced his retirement, and I decided to leave, because the pleasure of working with a good colleague is all that was keeping me in that denomination by that point. I nearly resigned a few years earlier over “Commagate”

But - with four churches to look after - what I notice where I am now, is that the services which are morning prayer (because the priest is in one of the other four churches) show a marked drop in attendance.

I would expect this, because I know a number of Orthodox clergy who are responsible for multiple parishes, and whenever they are absent, something called the Typika, which is basically Ante Communion, is served instead (as it can be done with a reader or no clergy at all). Although I would be interested to know if Ante Communion is not allowed without a priest? Also, the old BCP has rubrics that allow Mattins to be used in lieu of Ante-Communion; I wonder what would happen if you used that. I haven’t yet bought your BCP because I forgot what color to get, embarassingly, so I am just going off of the 1662, where Ante Communion and Mattins are pretty radically different.

But even if they were the same, the lack of communion or another compelling sacrament will cause reduced attendance. Its not just the lack of communion that causes Typika services or the Mattins held in your absence to have lower attendance - it is also your absence. People want to hear you preach; the fact that they stuck around after you were installed is a good sign they like you, and you are certainly missed in those places where you served previously. Even in the case of the Orthodox and Latin Rite Catholic communities, where priests often try to avoid differentiating themselves from their colleagues so as to be interchangeable, people still get attached to them, and at a minimum, they want a priest, preferably their priest.

* I theoretically preach for 15 minutes, but that’s the maximum; I record myself and time myself so as to make sure the entire service fits into the desired ranges.. I don’t hate preaching, I enjoy it, but other aspects of the service can be just as edifying,

 

[chevyontheriver]

Indeed. I have a major gripe about mainline Protestant churches in the US doing sermons that are not well connected with the subject matter. One occasion relayed to me by my father, who was Methodist, I believe involved a Lay Preacher (or Lay Servant as they now call them), but most of those I encountered involved the principle pastor of the parish. The two worst examples were a Methodist elder on Epiphany Sunday delivering what would be a stirring discourse on the virtue of excellence, but which had little to do with either the Baptism of our Lord or the Three Wise Men, and a Finnish interim pastor in the Danish-American town of Solvang (which is beautiful and, having been to both, I can say a visit to Solvang is like a visit to the best parts of Denmark, only with larger automobiles and inferior public transport), at the Lutheran church, speculating during the Easter sermon at length on various controversial questions, such as whether or not our Lord was married. You could hear a collective groan from the congregation, and these people are largely Danish immigrants, from Denmark, and fairly liberal Christians; frankly, If he had read the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom and then seated himself everyone present would have been happier.

Which I did do by the way for my Sunday congregation on Easter Sunday, and it worked. I did not have to do an exegesis. I also used it as a model for the Paschal service I did for the Saturday congregation, which was tricky as I felt obliged to honor Easter Even and the Resurrection concurrently. I did this by talking, as I like to do, about the mystery of our Lord reposing on the sixth day in a tomb, to be resurrected the next day, and midway through, in between the Old Testament lessons (I added two extra lessons to both services of a prophetic nature), and the rest, I had the congregation sing Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent, and I removed my black tippet and donned a white stole and white cope, and removed black and violet coverings from the altar (I would like to have swapped out the paraments, which is what happens in the Russian Orthodox praxis this is based on, but I would have needed more people). From that point forward everything became joyful. I also added the resurrectional Gospel from St. John to both services due to the well known phenomenon of low attendance at Low Sunday (they must call it Low Sunday for a reason, I figure).

Some of the best homilies I have heard have been deliberately copped from the Fathers. Or substantially so.

 

[Paidiske]

I would expect this, because I know a number of Orthodox clergy who are responsible for multiple parishes, and whenever they are absent, something called the Typika, which is basically Ante Communion, is served instead (as it can be done with a reader or no clergy at all). Although I would be interested to know if Ante Communion is not allowed without a priest? Also, the old BCP has rubrics that allow Mattins to be used in lieu of Ante-Communion; I wonder what would happen if you used that. I haven’t yet bought your BCP because I forgot what color to get, embarassingly, so I am just going off of the 1662, where Ante Communion and Mattins are pretty radically different.

The current prayer book in Australia really doesn't have anything that corresponds to the old Matins/litany/ante-communion construction. We have a variety of options - Eucharistic services, morning/evening prayer, a service of "praise, prayer and proclamation," and so on - but each has its own integrity.

(When you buy A Prayer Book for Australia, you want the red one; the green is abbreviated and lacks the pastoral services etc).

But even if they were the same, the lack of communion or another compelling sacrament will cause reduced attendance. Its not just the lack of communion that causes Typika services or the Mattins held in your absence to have lower attendance - it is also your absence. People want to hear you preach; the fact that they stuck around after you were installed is a good sign they like you, and you are certainly missed in those places where you served previously. Even in the case of the Orthodox and Latin Rite Catholic communities, where priests often try to avoid differentiating themselves from their colleagues so as to be interchangeable, people still get attached to them, and at a minimum, they want a priest, preferably their priest.

While I like to think this is true, I think there are other factors in play. The morning prayer held in my absence doesn't typically have a sermon at all. This is a deficiency I want to tackle over time, but I'm still new here and have a lot of things to work on.

And I do think for a lot of people, if they're not receiving communion, they feel that is a "lesser" act of worship. And while that is, from a historical perspective, an interesting position for an Anglican to hold, it does seem to have taken root pretty firmly over the last 60 years or so.

 

[GreekOrthodox]

Most of our services are already well over an hour in length. Vesperal sermons tend to be 5 minutes or so at the end of the service.

The Great Vespers runs close to two and a half hours.

I need my voice for work the next day!

 

[chevyontheriver]

That may be true in the Roman Rite, where the scripture lessons in the Vetus Ordo are at times quite brief, and where public celebration of the Divine Office has always been lacking, but in Anglicanism, an article in LiturgyCanada which I can try to find a link to if desired, from 1996, consisted of a study by a priest comparing the 1962 Canadian BCP (which coincidentally came out at the same time as the last major TLM revision), with the RCL, and he found that the RCL read dramatically less of each Gospel than the BCP Eucharistic lectionary, particularly of the Gospel of John, of which only 68% appears in the RCL. The disparity was heightened if one factored in the Divine Office lectionary.

I am enjoying watching the Anglican Ordinatiates figure out how they are going to do things. They have had that tradition of public Divine Office which I also like. Their liturgies are LONG and my wife does not appreciate that so much.

I had tried to bring the Divine Office into education committee meetings at an old parish where I was committee chair, and with some success. People liked it. But my goal was more to introduce it to them for private use than to launch a regular permanent public celebration. We got our business done and then went into the church for prayer. But that was only once every few weeks.

I know there are many who pray the Divine office every using the Magnificat booklets, or some other similar booklets, and among those many who would like a public celebration of it on a regular basis.

Year D is a proposed fix to some of the defects of the RCL, and they are real defects, proposed by Rev. Slemmons, and he wrote up an excellent description and walkthrough of it explaining shortfalls of the RCL and his proposed lessons for Year D. You can buy it on Amazon Kindle or in print, inexpensively. Some of his lectionary choices are striking and unconventional, but then again, the Eastern Orthodox read John 1:1-17 at the Paschal Divine Liturgy (of course, an hour or so earlier they heard the shorter ending of Mark at Paschal Matins). However, the Western church using John 1:1-14 for Christmas Day, or Christmas Sunday, by itself, if one assumes that were the main service and not the vespers the night before, is pretty bold also.

If one has a three year lectionary, why not consider a fourth? Especially if it brings in more Scripture. But what was lost when the one year Vetus Oedo lectionary was 'improved' to three years? I know some who consider that a great deal was lost. I'm not sure I understand them, and maybe from lack of trying.

 

[The Liturgist]

I am enjoying watching the Anglican Ordinatiates figure out how they are going to do things. They have had that tradition of public Divine Office which I also like. Their liturgies are LONG and my wife does not appreciate that so much.

I had tried to bring the Divine Office into education committee meetings at an old parish where I was committee chair, and with some success. People liked it. But my goal was more to introduce it to them for private use than to launch a regular permanent public celebration. We got our business done and then went into the church for prayer. But that was only once every few weeks.

I know there are many who pray the Divine office every using the Magnificat booklets, or some other similar booklets, and among those many who would like a public celebration of it on a regular basis.

If one has a three year lectionary, why not consider a fourth? Especially if it brings in more Scripture. But what was lost when the one year Vetus Oedo lectionary was 'improved' to three years? I know some who consider that a great deal was lost. I'm not sure I understand them, and maybe from lack of trying.

The great liturgical commentator Fr. Robert Taft SJ lamented bitterly over the medieval devotionalization of the Divine Office and the failure of the new Liturgy of the Hours to correct it. Naturally he had high praise for Anglicanism’s success in reviving the Office, and even more praise for the Byzantine Rite, Coptic Rite and the East Syriac Rite (the Assyrian Church of the East) for the high level attendance at their office, the partial preservation of a cathedral use stratum in the Coptic Rite, and the fact that the Church of the East is the only church whose Divine Office is purely of cathedral origin. His book, The Liturgy of the Hours, is thrilling, as it compares the Divine Offices of every church, and so is his remarkably brief but good A Brief History of the Byzantine Rite.

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

The problem I see with your proposed bundling, @The Liturgist, is the number of different sermons one would be writing each week (rather than giving the same sermon three or four times).

You are so right. Two different services a week, two different sermons, teach one (or more) Bible Studies, visit shut-ins, sick calls, Confession, meetings, then add in family responsibilities with a spouse and children. Busy. Too busy; road to burn-out.

For variety, we have 5 different settings for the Divine Service, the various settings for the Daily Office, we have the RCL but retained in our Service book, the historic 1 year lectionairy. Some of our Churches use the 1 year exclusively (Pastor and I both wish we would too), some use the 1 year as a year "D"; eg. A, B, C, 1, B, C, A, 1... if you have that option, I think it is a good compromise. Or alturnate every second year with the 1 year, but stay on the same year as the rest of the Church on the letter years.