An Uncommon Lectionary

I was inspired to buy The Uncommon Lectionary by a brief excerpt I came across on Google Books while searching for something else. The extract was one of the bits where the author describes the experience of a long-established urban US Episcopal church, ‘Old Trinity’, which adopts the book's recommendations and is transformed as a result. I felt more than a little swindled by discovering, once I had the book, that Old Trinity doesn't exist, but is Thomas Bandy’s imagining of what might happen to a church of its type going through this transformative process. What looked at first glance like a case study is actually a fantasy; in fact I can’t find any evidence that a single church, whether in the US or anywhere else, has actually adopted this strategy, although a pastor or two has used Mr Bandy’s lectionary as a basis for planning their own sermons – not the root-and-branch reform he intended at all.

The book’s contention is this: that the Revised Common Lectionary, as used by Anglican, Roman Catholic, and a variety of other Churches, is intended to develop Christians as disciples through its three-year cycle of Bible readings organised around the Christian year. It fails, because its assumptions are outdated. There is no longer enough background knowledge of the Biblical narrative for people to contextualise the extracts; the Christian year no longer patterns secular life and so makes no sense to most people; and people do not worship often enough or consistently enough to be effectively discipled in this way. It is also not missionary, and so is of limited use in a secularizing society in which Christians are increasingly a minority. Instead, churches wanting to grow and deepen should develop two parallel worship cycles which are designed to introduce non-Christians to the faith via ‘the 52 Bible passages which everyone should know’ (the ‘Seeker Cycle’) and to strengthen the faith of existing Christians (the ‘Disciple Cycle’). A church might decide to carry on with a traditional Common Lectionary-based cycle as well for those that want it. Both Seeker and Disciple Cycles should reflect the secular year which actually conditions the lives of worshippers, not a liturgical-mystical year disconnected from it. Worship in both Cycles is designed by small teams to use a variety of stimuli and media to communicate the message of each service.

I was enthused by the idea of The Uncommon Lectionary as its theme tied in exactly with some of the thoughts I was having about our own services: how the late-1960s model Parish Eucharist is intended to teach and equip the Body of Christ for its work by means of the liturgical year and the cycle of associated readings, and how this both no longer worked in its own terms, nor was actually adapted to the needs of people exploring the Christian faith. That aspect of what the book had to say did not disappoint, notwithstanding the fantasy story of Old Trinity that runs through it. However I had serious misgivings about other elements.

For a start, The Uncommon Lectionary puts all its emphasis on worship. It envisages the two Cycles being at the heart of worship events which each include teaching, discussion, and music. The trouble is that this still locks together all forms of Christian ‘development’ in one event, just like more traditional forms. It ignores the need for people to develop relationships of trust with one another before they become open to the kind of sharing and discipleship the scheme envisages, which commonly happens in small groups not driven by ‘worship’ except in the very broadest sense. Although it recognises that different groups of people need different things according to which stage in their spiritual development they may have reached, it still envisages those things being provided by worship events.

Although it stresses the nature of ‘great worship’ (as opposed to professionalised ‘good worship) as an encounter with the divine, The Uncommon Lectionary’s actual instances of worship are jejune, contrived, and weak. On p.83 the fantasy worship design team discusses an event intended as part of a community carnival:

as the drum rolls, the diver slowly climbs to the top. A big sign on the ladder says This is you! A big sign on the pool of water says This is grace! We lead the whole crowd to say the Lord’s Prayer. The diver plummets 50 feet; the splash gets everybody wet … the organist and choir plunge into the Hallelujah Chorus … we could pour kerosene on the water and light it … it would dramatize even more the extinguishing of sin and the hope of salvation.

It doesn’t seem to strike the imaginary team that nothing symbolises baptism as effectively as … baptism. The Christian tradition already has a battery of ways of expressing the process of salvation which work precisely because they are not just symbols, made up by people, but sacraments devised by God that map out the sites of his promises and ours - as opposed to, clod-hopping, cloth-eared, ham-fisted attempts at symbolism and allegory which come out of a committee; some examples of which many of us have experienced.

The Uncommon Lectionary overplays its rhetoric of de-professionalisation. Although it talks about worship emerging from the Christian community, designed and adapted for its own needs, the worship events are still being devised and designed by a group of people for other people, notwithstanding the rhetoric of consultation and evaluation; and the evaluation criteria are hopelessly unquantifiable (‘have people had an experience of grace?’). One of the great virtues of liturgical worship is that it is owned by the Church as a whole and not controlled by small groups; worship leaders and musicians do not decide what happens or how many times a chorus is repeated. Everyone serves the liturgy, and no one is its master.

The Uncommon Lectionary doesn’t grasp the Christian virtue of obedience. The Christian spiritual tradition places such a heavy emphasis on obedience because this is how we learn to step outside our own wills and to discover the will of God. Nothing else is more important. The great worth of having a lectionary of any sort is that it takes control out of the hands of the preacher and subjects them to a discipline beyond themselves. An Uncommon Lectionary still does this, even when it’s devised by a church community together and its origins are visible, but the effect is hopelessly vitiated when the process is surrounded by the rhetoric of choice, artistry, and self-determination. This is entirely the wrong direction in which to point our wills.

I can see the suggestions of this book being very applicable to house groups and perhaps even adapted to worship. But any such process would need to take place within a church context which takes far more seriously the rest of the Christian tradition and its insights.