Easter - growing up, today

Christian ethics and theology with an Anabaptist perspective
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Bootstrap
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Easter - growing up, today

Post by Bootstrap »

How did you celebrate Easter growing up? How do you celebrate Easter today? How has this changed over the course of your life, and why?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from plain Mennos, people who grew up Amish, etc., but I'd like to hear from anyone.
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RZehr
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by RZehr »

Growing up in an intermediate conservative western Mennonite church, I don't remember any early morning services, nothing in the preceding week, no decorations, no traditional foods, or meals. I think pretty much all we did was have an resurrection sermon.

Now, there the resurrection sermon and there is usually some pre-service singing at the church, not sunrise. I think the youth in some of our churches may have a sunrise service sometimes. Easter lily's are commonly purchase for home decoration or given to individuals as gifts.
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KingdomBuilder
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by KingdomBuilder »

In the large SBC congregation I grew up in, Easter was "the big one". It was the only Sunday when all of the extended family went to church together. In fact, the attendance of the church on Easter always seemed to swell by about 5 times the normal.

Our service was relatively early (they had two services since the attendance was so high). I should note that this was before the church joined the practice of having 2 services each Sunday ("traditional" and "contemporary"- the second one is so hip as to meet at 11:11.. :roll: ). Now, the church has at least 3 Easter morning services.

The sermons always seemed, to me, lacking zeal... :? They had a lot of fancy banners in the sanctuary, a huge choir production, maybe the hand-bell chorus would play, but the sermon seemed to be in "second place" to these things. That's how it felt to me. The message seemed basic and unobtrusive. It could easily have been me, though.

After church, we'd speed away to grandmas for a long day of lunch and a few rounds of egg hunts. In our family, it's been tradition for adults to hunt eggs, too (this had kind of faded, though).

Now, at my current church, our one service starts at 7:00 a.m.. We will all sing relevant hymns, a small group will go on to sing a song they've specially prepared, we will take communion, and then receive the message. Afterwards, we will stay together for a brunch. Very low on the "production factor".

After that, I'll join the rest of my family for a meal.
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MaxPC
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by MaxPC »

Interesting. The only real differences between then and now are in two categories:
-most of the Masses are now in the vernacular instead of Latin.
-some of the liturgy is simplified so that each day is about 1 hour less time at church on each of the three days.
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Josh
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by Josh »

Where I grew up (charismatic church in Australia, sister conference to Assemblies of God), Easter was not a special day except that everyone tried to invite lots of people to church. I didn't grow up with special significance for it.

In America, my family was in home-fellowship sort of circles for a while, and ones that didn't necessarily meet on Sunday. Easter had almost no significance. Some people had a beef with the word "Easter" and so out of respect we called it "Resurrection Sunday". I've probably been to as many siddarim, or heavily Christianised versions thereof, as I have been to formal Easter services in my lifetime.

When I was an adult I was a progressive Mennonite for some time, and we were pretty caught up in things like Lent, Advent, and other aspects of the (Catholic) Christian calendar. I used to do those things. Easter itself was a fairly "normal" service, though, it really just marked the end of Lent and it was a day you were encouraged to invite lots of people. When I lived in California once we had a sunrise service on top of a mountaintop nearby. That was kind of neat.

Since I entered the plain world, there's not a lot of observation of Easter. My old church does a sunrise service and Easter breakfast buffet, which seems to be a holdover from the old Amish ways. In the CGCM, there's no special observance of Easter at all, other than special singing about Christ's resurrection.
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by Bootstrap »

I grew up in a Methodist church in a small town in rural Western New York.

We had a sunrise service near the lake, hosted by the Salvation Army band, for several churches. It was always well attended. I still can't sing the song "Up from the grave he arose!" without hearing the brass section and my father's booming double bass voice.

Then we went to our own church for Easter breakfast, followed by a celebratory Easter service, the choir always had something special on tap, generally something written by Bach. The sermon was always very focused on the supernatural power of the resurrection. After that, we would go home for an easter banquet with the family.
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Hats Off
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Re: Easter - growing up, today

Post by Hats Off »

In our old order world, very little has changed. We go to church on Easter Sunday as at any other time. Resurrection songs are sung and a resurrection scripture is read and the messages are based on that theme. Growing up this was all in German but the church we are part of has switched to only English services.
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