What is Year W?
With the first Sunday in Advent, 11/27/2022, we are beginning a year-long journey in worship and study—Year W—listening to voices of women, girls, and the divine feminine, with the inspiration and guidance of groundbreaking Bible scholar Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney.
Rev. Dr. Gafney is an African-American woman, an Episcopal priest, and a local church pastor, and she currently serves in an endowed chair for Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School. In A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W (2021), she asks us to consider what it looks like “to tell the good news through the stories of women who are often on the margins of scripture and often set up to represent bad news in the Bible. Year W is a tool to help us work with those questions.
Over the course of one year from Advent to Advent, we will use Prof. Gafney’s translations, which seek to breathe new life into texts long bound by a cultural insistence on male-centered language for persons, peoples, even God, as we make our way through her suggested schedule of readings, rather than the more familiar Revised Common Lectionary.
We will hear new stories and hear familiar stories in new ways. It will not always be easy—there are troubling stories in the Bible, as we all know, particularly those of women—but there will be new joys, as well, and after careful consideration, the Board of Deacons and our pastors, Rev. John MacIver Gage and Rev. Maddie Foster, believe this is an important journey well worth making together.
With the first Sunday in Advent, 11/27/2022, we are beginning a year-long journey in worship and study—Year W—listening to voices of women, girls, and the divine feminine, with the inspiration and guidance of groundbreaking Bible scholar Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney.
Rev. Dr. Gafney is an African-American woman, an Episcopal priest, and a local church pastor, and she currently serves in an endowed chair for Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School. In A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W (2021), she asks us to consider what it looks like “to tell the good news through the stories of women who are often on the margins of scripture and often set up to represent bad news in the Bible. Year W is a tool to help us work with those questions.
Over the course of one year from Advent to Advent, we will use Prof. Gafney’s translations, which seek to breathe new life into texts long bound by a cultural insistence on male-centered language for persons, peoples, even God, as we make our way through her suggested schedule of readings, rather than the more familiar Revised Common Lectionary.
We will hear new stories and hear familiar stories in new ways. It will not always be easy—there are troubling stories in the Bible, as we all know, particularly those of women—but there will be new joys, as well, and after careful consideration, the Board of Deacons and our pastors, Rev. John MacIver Gage and Rev. Maddie Foster, believe this is an important journey well worth making together.
To listen to or watch some of our Year W sermons, go to our Sermons page here