Thank you Philip for bringing this site to my attention.
This is a site for those who preach from the lectionary. It takes the text for the week and gives lots of background information and alternate translations to aid in Bible study, & lesson/sermon preparation.
I know an extremely small % of those who read at this site use the lectionary. I may do a post on here before long on the + & – of the lectionary before long. I have done quite a bit of looking into it but don’t use it myself. The major plus is that you preach a text that isn’t your pet-project text/your favorite. It forces you to think about texts that you would not normally preach and that is a good thing. Two big negatives: 1) Context 2)Canon within a canon – by only preaching lectionary texts you are limiting yourself to a small percentage of the canon. But, most people do that on their own any way so that may not be that big of a problem. Many people want to say there are agendas in the lectionary – feminism, for example. That is not totally accurate as texts that are more conservative on women’s roles are covered in the Revised Common Lectionary.
Anyway, lectionary or not have a look and enjoy the resources they have compiled. Thank you Philip, it will certainly help.
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Matt,
I actually spent three years, from 2000-2002, preaching the lectionary texts so I could get though years A, B, and C. I used text week, finding the links only moderately helpful but mainly using it for the calendar in chart form.
The main criticism I’ve heard has not been feminism, but a curious absence of “judgement” texts. Not many sermons on hell, etc. I didn’t really notice.
The strength is, as you say, that you don’t preach pet projects and the weakness is a canon within a canon. I’ve avoided the pitfalls of “pet projects” and a limited canon by preaching my own lectionary.
I alternate between topical series (Ten Commandments, Fruit of the Spirit, Baptism, etc) and series from biblical books. When I do the series on books, I alternate among literary genres making sure that in the course of a couple of years I’ve hit at least one book from each genre. I insert mini-series from the Gospels in-between each of the other series.
So this is just the way one guy does it.
I really appreciated your post and the information on planning topics. I meant to address this sooner. I think what you have laid out would be very beneficial. I think it is important to plan ahead a course and a vision but also to not so rigidly follow something that we have little relevance to what is going on in our world. I think what you have written is a good balance. God bless