Old Testament Lections Project Completed!

Kerry News & Announcements, Resource Liturgical

Cover artworkIn Autumn 2021, the National Council of the Prayer Book Society of Canada endorsed a proposal to develop a series of Old Testament Lessons to complement the one-year eucharistic lectionary contained in the 1962 Book of Common Prayer. The PBSC embraced the Lectionary Supplement Project as part of its central mission to promote common prayer. The Society believes that the traditional eucharistic lectionary is a key part of the Prayer Book’s witness to the life-giving faith of the ancient and universal church, and that congregations which are willing to re-introduce this lectionary should be supported in doing so. Supplying Old Testament lessons alongside the Epistles and Gospels facilitates this transition for congregations using a contemporary lectionary.

A working group met from late 2021 until Summer 2024 to undertake this work, and produced far more than a list of biblical citations. The PBSC is proud to announce the publication of two lectern and study editions of the supplemented traditional lectionary, both of which can be ordered through Amazon: a Contemporary-Language Edition and a Traditional-Language Edition, each selling for $33.62 (the first drawing on the ESV and BAS Psalter, and the second using the KJV and BCP Psalter). Alternatively, the Traditional-Language Edition can be downloaded as a pdf using the link below. Further resources supporting parish use of this lectionary can also be found below: a brief summary of the rationale for the Old Testament selections, printable charts containing the citations for the lectionary, and Microsoft Word documents of the Introit and Gradual Psalms for use in parish bulletins.

In 2024, the Old Testament Lections project took an exciting new turn when clergy in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) reached out to the PBSC asking that an edition of the one-year lectionary be prepared using the Psalter, Collects, and Calendar of the 2019 Book of Common Prayer. As the conversation developed, it became clear that it would be more appropriate in the ACNA context for the new edition to reflect the 1662 BCP as the primary source, rather than the Canadian 1962 BCP. We therefore published the final project as The Lectionary of 1662, Adapted and Supplemented. It returns to the 1662 Epistles and Gospels, but supplemented with the PBSC’s Old Testament Lections, the Canadian Introit and Gradual Psalms, occasions in the 2019 BCP’s Calendar not included in 1662, and various other elements of the 1962 and 2019 Prayer Books. Amazon purchase links are as follows: 1662 Contemporary-Language Edition, and 1662 Traditional-Language Edition. The Traditional-Language Edition can also be downloaded as a pdf using the link below.

  • (Regrettably we’re not able to make the Contemporary-Language version of either lectionary available here due to copyright rules for the ESV).

We hope that our print editions will find a home not only in the Anglican Church of Canada, but in other Anglican provinces and jurisdictions, since we all share a common heritage in the traditional, one-year lectionary of the Western church.

Feedback and typo corrections may be sent to benvonbredow@gmail.com.

The following are excerpts from the Preface to the lectern editions:

The traditional one-year lectionary in every edition of the Book of Common Prayer up to 1962 is its most enduring connection to the mind and practice of the early church, even more than the daily office and eucharistic services which have been revised more often down the centuries. The lectionary shows us how the early church understood the scriptures and understood itself. The scriptures are a witness to the person of Christ, who is alive, and through whom the church lives in God by faith. Christ is the church’s living head, “for whom and to whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The lectionary mirrors this faith because it is always structured “for Christ and to Christ”; in the lectionary, the readings break out of their canonical context to give voice to the church’s communion with Jesus. The church’s self-understanding as the body of Christ is so essential to the Christian message that, despite centuries of revisions to other aspects of the church’s worship, the lectionary which emphasizes this theme has endured with relatively little change.

…

The traditional lectionary is the voice in which the church articulates her life in Christ. The lectionary is not just a form in which doctrine is presented it to the church, but a document of the church. The lectionary is one the church’s ancient constitutional documents alongside the scriptures as a canon, the ancient liturgies, the creeds, and the apostolic-episcopal form of polity.

We can therefore ask of the lectionary, “What does the church say about herself?” The lectionary’s answer could be stated this way: “The church is Christ’s body, the site of his continuing incarnate life, a participant in his divine sonship to the Father, and the bearer of his Spirit.” The lectionary has a built-in theological disposition, a tendency to emphasize the indwelling of God in the church and the church’s participation in God through Christ. This focus emerges, despite the relatively small portion of the Bible which it uses, because the lectionary returns repeatedly to a group of themes which all resonate with the central idea of participation in God: that we are given new birth by God’s Spirit, that the love of Christians for one another is the love of God made manifest, that both our repentance from sin and our rising to new life take place as members in Christ, that the joy of the kingdom is realized among us as we await his return, and that Christ is our daily spiritual food.

…

Nothing we have said above about the virtues of the one-year lectionary or the failures of the Revised Common Lectionary necessitates supplementing it with Old Testament readings, as we have done in this volume. The traditional lectionary fed the people of God for more than a millennium without an Old Testament reading, and its logic is already living and active in the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels without any further exposition by additional readings. The rationale for the Old Testament supplement is pastoral, not theological.

…

The primary rationale for developing the Old Testament series has been to facilitate parishes transitioning from the Revised Common Lectionary to the one-year lectionary. Most contemporary parishioners have only or mostly known a liturgical environment dominated by the Revised Common Lectionary. For them, one of the most significant factors that makes the traditional lectionary a hard pill to swallow is that it does not include an Old Testament reading. The faithful expect to hear the Old Testament read and preached—and rightly so! Every Christian tradition has made space for the Old Testament, even if it has not been at the Eucharist. Unfortunately, the healthy desire to engage with the Old Testament has become one of the principal reasons that congregations do not use the traditional lectionary.

Second, the Old Testament supplement was proposed to bring the existing ad hoc practice of some parishes into a common pattern. Especially in BCP-friendly congregations, it is a poor witness to the Anglican tradition of common prayer that parishes which already use an Old Testament supplement draw eclectically from many sources, not observing a common discipline. We hope that endorsement of a single supplement by the Prayer Book Society of Canada will unify the practice of supplementing the one-year lectionary, at least within this country.

Old Testament Lections Project Completed!