A lectionary is a table of Bible readings appointed for each Sunday and festival of the church year. If you have worshiped in another Lutheran church, you may notice that our readings differ from the ones you heard there. Our Saviour follows the historic one-year lectionary, and most congregations today follow a three-year lectionary. This page explains the difference and why we keep the older practice.
What it is
In the one-year lectionary, each Sunday has its own fixed readings, and they return every year on the same Sunday. The Second Sunday after Easter, Misericordias Domini, always has the Good Shepherd Gospel (John 10:11-16). The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare, always has the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:1-15). The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity always has the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:23-37). Each Sunday has an Old Testament reading, an Epistle, and a Gospel, along with its own Introit, Collect, and Gradual. Together these are called the propers of the day.
An old practice
The core of this lectionary is very old. Lists of Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays of the year survive from the seventh and eighth centuries, and the Western church read them for more than a thousand years. The Lutheran reformers kept them. Luther retained the traditional Epistles and Gospels in his German Mass of 1526, and his postils, the collections of sermons that he published for pastors and families, follow the same readings Sunday by Sunday. Lutherans in Germany, Scandinavia, and America heard these texts for four centuries. The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941, the hymnal of the Missouri Synod for most of the twentieth century, was built on them.
Where the three-year lectionary came from
After the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church introduced a new three-year lectionary in 1969. Many Protestant churches adopted versions of it in the following years. Most Missouri Synod congregations began using a three-year series with Lutheran Worship in 1982. The three-year lectionary assigns a different set of readings to each Sunday in each of its three years, called Series A, B, and C, and it takes most of each year’s Gospel readings from one of the first three Gospels.
Lutheran Service Book (2006), our current hymnal, provides both lectionaries. Our use of the one-year lectionary is fully within the practice of the Missouri Synod.
Why we keep it
Repetition teaches. A member who hears the same readings on the same Sunday year after year comes to know them the way a child comes to know the Lord’s Prayer. After a few years, the Sunday’s name alone calls its Gospel to mind. The readings become part of the congregation’s memory, not a passing encounter.
The one-year lectionary also joins us to the preaching and music of the whole Lutheran church. Luther’s sermons, the sermons of generations of Lutheran pastors, and many of the hymns in our hymnal were written for these Sundays and their readings. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his church cantatas for the Sundays of this lectionary as it was read in Leipzig. When we hear the Gospel for a given Sunday, we hear the same text that shaped all of that work.
The readings are also arranged with care. The Sundays of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons reveal who Jesus is. Lent leads to the cross, and Easter proclaims the resurrection. The Sundays after Trinity then teach the Christian life that flows from those events. Our page on the church year and its colors walks through each season.
Hearing the rest of Scripture
The three-year lectionary covers more of the Bible on Sunday mornings, and we value those readings too. For that reason, our Sunday Bible class spends each summer studying the best readings from the year of the three-year lectionary that the wider church is using. In the summer of 2026, the class studied selected readings from Series A. Our members keep the historic readings in the Divine Service and still study many of the texts that other congregations hear on Sunday.
The appointed readings for each month appear in our parish newsletter.