Irma Fast Dueck reflects on lectionaries, honesty and worship



WINNIPEG

As some churches within MC Canada and MC USA embrace the Narrative Lectionary, Canadian Mennonite caught up with Irma Fast Dueck to ask about the use of lectionaries in Mennonite worship.

Fast Dueck is associate professor of practical theology at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) where she has taught for over 30 years. She attends Bethel Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, where she is regularly invited to preach.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you know about the Narrative Lectionary (NL)?

I hear good things about this Narrative Lectionary. I’ve never used it, but I hear churches who’ve moved to it have really liked it. They have found it very refreshing compared to the Common Revised Lectionary (CRL). I’ve also heard from CMU colleagues that it’s a better resource for preachers.

One advantage, pastors say, is that the NL provides just one text per Sunday, instead of the four suggest in the CRL. It cuts down on worship planning as a whole in that you don’t have to try and pull all these pieces together to work with a theme per se.

And that works well for Mennonites. Mennonite Church Canada and MC USA people tend to shape our worship around the theme of the text. Right now, Bethel’s doing one on food.

Frustrations with the CRL arise when the four texts don’t necessarily relate to each other. Sometimes they connect and sometimes they don’t.

Why do Mennonites gravitate towards the lectionary in this way?

It’s how you see the place of Scripture in the service. For mainline Protestant/Catholic churches, Scripture stands alone. It doesn’t need to be preached on or sung about, it’s just read well and the reading is a sacred act. For Mennonites, the preaching is the sacred act. So if the text doesn’t feed the preaching, what good is it? (laughs). That’s a crass way of putting it.

I think it is a distinctively Mennonite Church Canada-MC USA quality in among the rest of the Mennonite denominations and the mainline Protestant/Catholic church, where we really have this compulsion to shape our whole worship around a text and a theme: we’ll sing it, we’ll read it, we’ll tell the children’s story about it, we’ll do everything. It’s how we shape our liturgy. I like that kind of propensity, to give a kind of unity to our liturgy in that way.

Why are lectionaries useful for worship planners?

When I talk about the lectionary with Mennonite Brethren folks, people feel right away like, “We’re quashing the Spirit here because we’re using the lectionary.” They find it very restrictive. For those of us who plan worship all the time, it’s a real blessing to know that, “I don’t have to think about where the Spirit is leading me this week (laughs). It’s going to be Romans 8 because that’s what’s in the lectionary!”

What I love about the lectionary period, whether it’s the NL or CSL, is that it just keeps us honest. I remember one time I was supposed to preach at Bethel and the two lectionary texts were on divorce and on David and Goliath—two texts I had no interest in preaching on. But you sweat your way through it. I think I did David and Goliath.

It’s probably also good for us to preach a text on divorce, even now, in this day and age. The text gives us a kind of honesty and a kind of integrity.

Anything else distinctively Mennonite when it comes to lectionaries?

We don’t worship the lectionary. Mennonites have always had that freedom to say, “Okay now we’re going to just put this on the shelf and we’re going to work at this.” I’d be hard-pressed to find a Mennonite church that, if the lectionary doesn’t work for them, they just don’t use it. With any other denomination you’re committed to reading the text, whether you use it in other elements of worship, or not.

See also:

Pastors embrace Narrative Lectionary

Alberta writing team creates 2024 Advent resources



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