Reformation Sunday is the one Sunday of the year when a congregation is asked to look at its own origins. For churches in the progressive and affirming mainline, that is not a simple assignment. The story includes a printing press that put scripture in ordinary hands, and it includes a pamphlet against Jewish people, a war against peasants, and a long list of people the reformers themselves refused to reform for. This guide covers when the day falls, what it commemorates, what both sets of appointed readings say, and how to preach and lead worship on a day whose meaning is not an anniversary but a practice.

Reformation Day is October 31, the date in 1517 traditionally given for Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses. Reformation Sunday is the Sunday the observance is kept in worship — in most congregations, the last Sunday in October.

Not every tradition keeps it. It is most widely observed in Lutheran churches, where it is a festival with its own appointed readings, and in Reformed and Presbyterian congregations. Many Episcopal, Methodist, and United Church of Christ congregations keep the ordinary Sunday of the season instead, or mark the day briefly within it. Both are ordinary practice, and the readings section below covers both.

The familiar version is a hammer and a door. It is worth knowing that the door is the least documented part of it. Luther never described nailing anything; the account comes from Philip Melanchthon, published after Luther’s death, and historians have argued about it for a century. What is documented is that the theses were written in Latin as an invitation to academic debate, sent to a bishop, and then printed — and that within a few weeks they were circulating across the German-speaking world in numbers no manuscript could have reached.

That is the part worth commemorating, and it is a better story than the hero version. The Reformation’s engine was access. An argument about the church became something ordinary people could read, in their own language, and judge for themselves. Every tradition that came out of that moment inherited the same conviction: the church is answerable to people who can read its own texts.

It is also why the Reformation was never going to stay finished. A church that hands out the reading is a church that will keep being read back to.

Mini Movie: Thanks To The Reformation ... →

A guide written for affirming congregations has to name four things that Reformation Sunday material generally does not. None of this is obscure; all of it is documented; and a congregation that hears it from you rather than from the internet is better served.

Mini Movie: An Honest Look At Reformation Sunday →

In 1543, Luther published a pamphlet attacking Jewish people and calling for violence against their communities. It was not an aside and it was not a product of his old age alone; it was printed, distributed, and read, and it was cited approvingly by the Nazi regime four centuries later. Lutheran bodies have addressed it directly. In April 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted a formal Declaration to the Jewish Community repudiating those writings, expressing sorrow for their consequences, and rejecting any use of them against Jewish people. Other Lutheran bodies worldwide have made similar statements.

That repudiation is not an embarrassed footnote to Reformation Sunday. It is the clearest available evidence that the tradition does what it says it does.

In 1524 and 1525, peasants across German-speaking Europe took the reformers’ arguments about Christian freedom and applied them to their own conditions, publishing demands that quoted scripture back at the nobility. Luther responded with a pamphlet urging the princes to put the uprising down without mercy. The revolt was crushed, and the death toll ran to the tens of thousands. The Reformation had discovered, early, that it preferred its liberty theological.

Others read the same texts and concluded that baptism should follow adult confession and that the church should be separate from state power. They were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike; Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in January 1527 by a Protestant city council, on the order of men who had been his colleagues. The Mennonite, Amish, Brethren, and Hutterite traditions descend from that movement, and their witness on nonviolence and believer’s baptism came at that cost.

Argula von Grumbach published a public defense of a student accused of heresy in 1523 and became one of the most widely read Protestant writers of the decade. Katharina Schütz Zell of Strasbourg published, pastored, sheltered refugees, and preached at her own husband’s funeral. Marie Dentière wrote in defense of women’s right to interpret scripture and was suppressed for it. Katharina von Bora, remembered mainly as Luther’s wife, ran the household economy that made his work possible. The Reformation gave the reading to everybody and then argued for four hundred years about whether women could say what they had read.

The Latin phrase attached to this day in the Reformed tradition is ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda — the church reformed, always being reformed — usually extended with secundum verbum Dei, according to the word of God. It is worth knowing that the phrase is not Luther’s or Calvin’s. It appears later, in the Dutch Further Reformation of the seventeenth century, commonly traced to Jodocus van Lodenstein in 1674, and its exact origin is still debated.

The grammar matters more than the provenance. Reformanda is passive: being reformed. It is not a boast that the church reforms itself whenever it likes, and it is not a license for change as such. It says the church is the object of an ongoing work it does not control — and that a church which believes it has finished has misunderstood what it belongs to.

For a progressive congregation, this is the whole day. The arguments your church is currently having about who may preach, who may marry, who may lead, and who is welcome at the table are not a departure from the Reformation. They are the most traditional thing you do. The tradition’s own record shows a church that has changed its mind about the vernacular, about slavery, about the ordination of women, and about its relationship to Jewish neighbors. It is still changing its mind. That is not the tradition failing. That is the tradition.

It also sets a test. If a reform does not produce more love of God and neighbor, the tradition has a word for it, and the word is not reformation.

Congregations that keep Reformation Day as a festival use the appointed Reformation propers. Congregations that keep the ordinary Sunday use the Revised Common Lectionary reading for that date. Both are below for 2026.

If your tradition leaves the choice open, the ordinary reading is the stronger one for the argument this day actually wants to make. Moses dies within sight of a country he does not enter, and the work continues without him — which is what an unfinished reformation looks like from the inside. And the appointed gospel is the great commandment, which is the test any reform has to pass.

The liturgy below is free to use and adapt in your congregation — copy it, cut it, put it in your bulletin. For the rest of the service, our Reformation Sunday resources include a two-minute visual liturgy built for this day, slide and social templates, and the full lectionary package for October 25 with bulletin-ready files.

Prefer a print-ready version? Download the free four-page PDF:

Leader: We gather in a church that has changed its mind before.
People: And may need to again.
Leader: We are the heirs of people who read for themselves, and would not stop.
People: Make us that kind of heir.
Leader: Not the keepers of a monument —
People: but a household still under construction.
Leader: Come, Holy One, and keep us unfinished.
ALL: Reform us, and keep reforming us. Amen.

Said together, then silence.
Holy One, we have inherited a good argument and a mixed record.
We were given a gospel anyone could read,
and we used the same presses to publish contempt for our Jewish neighbors.
We were given a word about freedom,
and when poor people took it seriously, we sided with the ones who had swords.
We found the courage to break with an authority we could not accept,
and then we punished the people who broke with us.
We have said the word reformed as though it were finished.
Forgive us the parts of this story we would rather not tell,
and give us the nerve to tell them.

Silence is kept.

Hear the good news: the God who reforms the church is not embarrassed by it.
Mercy here is not a pardon that ends the conversation.
It is permission to keep working.
You are forgiven. You are not finished.

Thanks be to God.

Holy One, we are the church that divided.
We have spent five centuries learning what was lost in the splitting,
and only a few decades learning to say so out loud.
For every table at which we have refused one another,
for the certainty we mistook for faith,
we ask your mercy.
Bless the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Anabaptist and the Pentecostal,
the congregations down the road we have never once spoken to,
and the Christians we would find hardest to sit beside.
Make the parts of your church that argue best
also the parts that love best.
We do not ask to be proved right.
We ask to be one, and honest. Amen.

Leader: The church once taught that the scriptures belonged to the clergy alone.
People: The church was reformed, and is always being reformed.
Leader: The church once taught that a woman could not preach what she had read.
People: The church was reformed, and is always being reformed.
Leader: The church once blessed the slave ship and the auction block.
People: The church was reformed, and is always being reformed.
Leader: The church once told our Jewish neighbors they were the enemies of God.
People: The church was reformed, and is always being reformed.
Leader: And the church still argues about who may love, and marry, and lead, and belong.
People: Reform us again. We are not finished.
Leader: And when this argument is over —
People: give us the humility to expect the next one.
Leader: Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.
ALL: Reformed, and always being reformed. Amen.

Go now as the people of an unfinished church.
Read for yourselves. Argue in love.
Tell the truth about where we have been,
and make room at the table before anyone has to ask you to.
And may the God who is still reforming you
bless you, and keep you restless,
and send you out in peace. Amen.

Deuteronomy 34 puts Moses on a mountain looking at a country he will not enter, and then it buries him and keeps going. Preached on Reformation Sunday, that is the whole doctrine of semper reformanda in narrative form: the work is real, the leader is not the point, and the arrival is somebody else’s. It also cuts against the hero version of 1517 without ever mentioning it.

Matthew 22:34–46 supplies the test. Every reform the church has ever attempted can be measured against whether it produced more love of God and neighbor, and that measure is available to a congregation in the middle of its own argument. The sermon almost writes itself: here is what we changed, here is how we know whether it was reformation or merely change.

Jeremiah 31:31–34 is the better text than it first appears, because the covenant it describes is written where no one can nail it up. A day that begins with a document on a door and ends with a promise written on hearts is a sermon about where authority actually lives.

Romans 3:19–28 is the traditional Reformation text and carries the traditional Reformation hazard: preached carelessly, law-versus-grace becomes Judaism-versus-Christianity, which is supersessionism and is exactly the framing this day should be dismantling. Paul is arguing inside his own tradition, not against it.

The appointed Reformation gospel is “the truth will make you free,” and it sits eleven verses above one of the most weaponized passages in the New Testament — the verse in which Jesus’s opponents are told their father is the devil. That text has been used against Jewish people for nineteen centuries, and it is appointed for a day commemorating the man who wrote the 1543 pamphlet.

The instinct is to preach verses 31 to 36 and stop before the trouble. Consider preaching the trouble instead. Name what is eleven verses down, name what the church did with it, name the 1994 declaration, and let the congregation watch a preacher handle the tradition honestly in real time. There is no more direct demonstration of what “always being reformed” means than doing it from the pulpit on the day itself.

If you would rather not spend the sermon there, the honest minimum is a sentence in the introduction acknowledging the passage’s history before you use it. Preaching “the truth will make you free” out of that chapter without naming what the chapter has been used for is the one move this day cannot afford.

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When is Reformation Sunday?
Reformation Sunday is usually the last Sunday in October, and Reformation Day is October 31. In 2026 it falls on October 25; in 2027 on October 31; in 2028 on October 29. It is most widely observed in Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian congregations.

What is Reformation Sunday?
It commemorates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, dated to Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses in October 1517. The theses were written in Latin for academic debate and then printed, and it was the printing — not the famous door — that spread them across Europe within weeks.

What are the readings and liturgical color for Reformation Sunday?
Congregations keeping it as a festival use the Reformation propers — Jeremiah 31:31–34, Psalm 46, Romans 3:19–28, and John 8:31–36 — with red paraments. Congregations keeping the ordinary Sunday use the Revised Common Lectionary reading for the date; on October 25, 2026 that is Proper 25 in Year A, with green.

What does “semper reformanda” mean?
It is short for ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda — the church reformed, always being reformed. The verb is passive: the church is the object of an ongoing work rather than the author of it. The phrase is not Luther’s or Calvin’s; it appears later, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Further Reformation.

How should Reformation Sunday address Martin Luther’s writings about Jewish people?
Directly. Luther published a pamphlet attacking Jewish people in 1543 that was later cited approvingly by the Nazi regime. In 1994 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted a formal declaration repudiating those writings and rejecting any use of them against Jewish people. Naming both the writing and the repudiation is more faithful to the day than omitting either, and the repudiation is itself an example of a church being reformed.