Want the Liturgy in Your Church? Consider the History

Since some evangelical churches are interested in turning back to lectionary and liturgy, I thought it would be helpful to see exactly how these practices came about.

“Nothing is so characteristic of medieval preaching as the fact that it was fundamentally shaped by the lectionary. For considerably more than a millennium lectionary preaching was what the average Christian heard from the pulpit . . . . for the most part medieval preaching followed the traditional Gospels and Epistles. It had not always been that way; in fact, the lectionary appeared rather late in the history of Christian worship. It developed in those catastrophic times between Leo the Great in the middle of the fifth century and Gregory the Great at the beginning of the seventh century, a period of roughly 150 years, when the Roman world began to realize that classical culture was passing away. The lectionary in many ways was an important aid for preserving a discipline of reading and preaching Scripture at a time when that surely must have been difficult, but at the same time it conventionalized Christian preaching so that for centuries its effect on the Christian world was more formal than vital . . . ."

“The sixth century was the century that saw the gradual end of liturgical improvisation. Preaching became more infrequent, and what preaching there was became more and more conventionalized. In fact, the ministry of the Word was often reduced simply to the reading of Scripture lessons with little attempt to preach those lessons . . . . in this century both liturgical prayer and liturgical lessons were canonized. By that we mean that they began to be set down, defined, and made a strict convention . . . . During the sixth century the Church was filled with ministers, both bishops and priests, who could not begin to extemporize a prayer, compose a well-thought-out sermon, organize a series of sermons, or work out an appropriate series of Scripture lessons . . . . it was an age characterized by the increasing inability of the ministry to preach. The lectionary — not the preacher — became the primary interpreter of Scripture, and the Word became known from being read in the liturgy rather than from being preached from the pulpit . . . . one had to tack all these things down so even a poorly trained country priest could conduct a service of worship with some modicum of order” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, 3:143, 154-5).