Saskatoon, SK.

Re: Why we use a lectionary, March, (p.15)

Thanks to Pastor Nevile for his thorough discussion of lectionaries! He may have misstated it when he wrote “early lectionaries provided a single year of readings.” Many of us were raised in church bodies such as the old Augustana Synod where a three-year lectionary was printed right in the hymnal.

One of the faults that Reformers of the sixteenth century found with the whole use of periscopes or lectionaries by the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches, was what they then called snippets of scripture, reading isolated short passages. To some extent the Revised Common Lectionary tried to correct that shortcoming.

I became the author of the Daily Bible Reading Guide for the Canadian Bible Society when criticisms had come to the Bible Society that the daily reading guide did not follow the church year or the lectionary.

Each year as the guide is prepared, I use and compare various lectionaries, and then choose texts that provide a more comprehensive reading from a book of the Bible, and if possible the entire book.

A conservative estimate would be that during those 36 years, over four million guides have been printed and distributed, including every year an edition that also offers some texts from books of the Apocrypha.