LectServe α

Welcome to LectServe αlpha!

LectServe is a tool I'm providing to the Church to quickly find lectionary readings for a given day.

For an example of how to use the API to automatically pull down the readings each week into a program like Drafts 5 for weekly sermon prep, please view this guide on my blog.

The backend supports both the Revised Common Lectionary and the ACNA lectionary for Sundays and Red-Letter days. I'm defaulting to the ACNA lectionary because I'm Anglican, but you can use the RCL if you would like.

The daily lectionary backend currently only supports the ACNA lectionary, but more are planned.

API Usage

All endpoints return JSON. Optionally, the argument ?lect=acna or ?lect=rcl can be given to each endpoint to specify the lectionary you wish to use for Sundays and Red-Letter days. /today and /date can take the argument dailyLect=? with the values acna-sec or acna-xian respectively for the current ACNA daily lectionary based on the civil calendar or the previous daily lectionary based on the liturgical calendar. The default lectionaries are the ACNA Sunday and Daily (Civil-based).

/today

Returns the lectionary payload for today's date. "Today" is relative to the US Central Time Zone.

/sunday

Returns the Sunday-only lectionary payload for the upcoming Sunday relative to "today".

/date/yyyy-mm-dd

Returns the lectionary payload for the given date. Date is given in four-digit year [yyyy], two-digit month [mm], and two digit day [dd] annotation with dashes between units. Christmas Day in 2016 would be given as /date/2016-12-25, for example.

Technical Information

LectServe is hosted on Linode and driven by Perl. The engine driving this site and the API is the wonderful Dancer2 framework and the Starman high-performance web server.

Behind the scenes all the hard work of finding our place in the lectionary is handled by the Date::Lectionary & Date::Lectionary::Daily modules and three helper modules Date::Advent, Date::Easter, and Date::Lectionary::Time.

Verison Information

• LectServe 1.20210127
• Date::Lectionary v1.20200203
• Date::Lectionary::Daily v1.20200102
• Date::Lectionary::Time v1.20180422.1

Issues

This API and all the supporting infrastructure is supported and maintained by me in my free time. Please log issues for the lectionary content or day determination logic to the Date::Lectionary or Date::Lectionary::Daily projects on GitHub. Issues for this API and website can be logged to the LectServe project, also on GitHub.

Updates about issues, downtime, new features, etc. will be shared on our Twitter account.

/ect

More information about me, Michael Arnold, can be found on my website, Twitter, and on GitHub.

If you or your church have technical needs, Michael does consulting & development work. He is available for hire at competitive rates and specializes in helping churches, non-profits, and small businesses.

A huge thanks and much gratitude to my lovely wife, Jennifer and my beautiful children, Rosemary, Oliver, & Virginia, for letting me spend some of my free time working on this project!

Above all, Soli Deo Gloria!