This year, holiday will feel brighter

More churches holding in-person services

As Christians plan to celebrate the second Easter amid a pandemic, a year of sacrifice, loss and isolation may be giving way to some hope, as more people are able to celebrate in person.

Not all churches will be opening. Many still are holding Holy Week and Easter services on Zoom or YouTube, and some will hold socially distanced services outdoors. But compared with 2020, when Easter fell on April 12, a month after the state went into lockdown, there is a sense of optimism in parishes.

After a year of meeting online, like many churches, First Calvary Baptist Church in New Haven held its first in-person, socially distanced service on March 21. “It felt great. It felt great to be in the physical building, to be with people,” said the Rev. Shevalle Kimber, co-pastor.

“Some I had not seen in a year so to see those faces, to elbow bump … it felt great.”

Before the pandemic, the parish had 40 to 45 people attending on a Sunday. For the first in-person service, there were 27 in church, 16 on Zoom and more on a conference call, Kimber said.

The Rev. Marjo Anderson, pastor of Salem Lutheran Church in Bridgeport, said her parish has been alternating in-person services with services on Zoom this month but will be meeting only in the church, while streaming on Facebook Live, as of Easter.

While people are excited to celebrate Easter in the Park Avenue church, Anderson was concerned about expectations. “I think the hardest thing is, people, especially older people who have been vaccinated, they want this pandemic to be over,” she said.

“Easter is coming … but I don’t think that Easter that we all want to feel is going to come as fast as Easter day,” she said. “Everybody’s going to be excited to be back, but my fear is that inside there will be this expectation that it will be as it was, and it won’t be.”

There will be flowers, but no singing in church, which raises the risk of spreading the virus. People will be seated from front to back and exit from back to front. Communion will be distributed in the pews. But in a way, Anderson will miss celebrating online.

“On Zoom, people can sing. … We can sing, we can have Communion in real time with real bread and wine and there’s more interaction,” she said. “You can see people’s expressions; you can see their smiles. To me it seemed more intimate than in person.” People also have joined in from distant places.

“I think one of the difficulties is we have not figured out how to do a good hybrid Zoom-live service,” Anderson said.

At Spring Glen Church in Hamden, services still are online, said the Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson, pastor of the United Church of Christ parish. “We tied our decision to the state’s case numbers,” he said.

Broadcasting on Facebook, YouTube and Google Meet, “our music is being done with a virtual choir and virtual band,” Davidson said. “We’ve got a group of members who’ve been working on it for about a month now.” On Palm Sunday, the music is from “Godspell.”

“The one thing we are doing for in-person option is on Palm Sunday we will have set up a labyrinth on our church lawn so people can do a self-guided walk through the labyrinth,” Davidson said. They planted 550 small red flags in the center to represent the 550,000 American dead from the pandemic and on Good Friday the Stations of the Cross will be done there.

On Easter, Communion will be celebrated virtually. “We call it BYOB Communion,” Davidson said. “People can use whatever food and drink they have at home: bread and wine, doughnuts and coffee, Oreos and milk.” There will be a contact-free Easter egg hunt in the labyrinth, as well.

“I’m hoping this is the last time we have to do this, but I think we’ve learned a lot over the last year about how to make virtual worship meaningful,” he said. “We have people worshiping with us who wouldn’t have been able to worship with us before. On Sunday mornings, our congregation spans three continents.”

Another reason Spring Glen is staying online, Davidson said, is “we’re a church that’s very much about inclusivity, so we don’t want to rush back until everybody can come back.”

Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green in New Haven has held services at 8 a.m. in the church, previously limited to 30 people, but on Easter there will be no limit. The Easter Vigil on Saturday evening and the 10 a.m. service on Easter Sunday will be on Zoom and YouTube, and the parish will hold an outdoor prayer service at 2 p.m. in Edgerton Park.