One of my favorite liturgies — dignified, flexible, not stuffy — is the old Church of South India liturgy. The CSI is a union church, consolidating Anglican, Methodist and Reformed denominations; it has 3.8 million members today and there are churches worldwide.
The old liturgy has the fingerprints of a newly post-colonial church; heck, it’s in English and was printed by Oxford University Press! So it seems very Western. (There’s a new liturgy; I don’t like it as much.)
But what really makes the work sing are its direction on how to modify the service to accommodate the then-unmelded denominational traditions and its church calendar.
The CSI used a one-year calendar that was both lectionary-based and thematically-driven. That should be interesting to Free Churchfolk with a taste for historic liturgy, even if only as an index or a “checklist” for possible preaching topics.
While the old and new liturgies have appeared online (at the website for a parish in Michigan) the lectionary never has. And while I’m guessing it’s in copyright, I think its use as a research tool — especially since it’s out of print and hard to find — might maybe justify my publishing a version here.
This is a spreadsheet, with my own way to describe the liturgical year. The ODS version — which you may open with OpenOffice or Google Docs — it the original. The Excel version is generated and its dates for Easter may not work.
1 comment