This year, the holiday will feel brighter
More parishes 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, but the parish will hold an outdoor prayer service at 2 p.m. in Edgerton Park.
The Rev. Luk De Volder, rector, said the service will “celebrate the sense of Resurrection and Easter by going to places where we have not been able to go, being in community … celebrating nature together and gather again in prayer.”
Leigh Cromey of Hamden, senior warden at Trinity, said, “I think it’s always good to try new things and I think the pandemic has given us the opportunity to try things we’d never thought we’d do in a million years.”
She said she’s appreciated seeing people on Zoom. “I don’t know that seeing people in person, especially since I can’t hug them or shake their hand or even get within 6 feet of them — I don’t know if that will feel
better. I think it might feel strange,” she said.
De Volder had a case of COVID during the winter and said it taught him “the power of the Resurrection is much more in our physical bodies than we acknowledge. … I at some point was so sick, I felt kind of my strength fading away. When that happened, I felt a community of love, a connection of love.”
First Church in Middletown also will be celebrating Easter outdoors. “The plan is to meet at the Veterans Memorial Park in Middletown, said the Rev. Virginia Child, interim pastor. “They’re very excited. It’s been more than a year now and particularly I think these days, because more and more people are vaccinated, it feels a little safer and maybe it is a little safer, but we don’t feel it’s safe to meet in our church.”
Child said she expects about half the normal attendance, but doesn’t know if that will be larger because more people tend to come to church on Easter. They will celebrate Communion as well. “You can buy teenyweeny little containers of grape juice and a cracker. They’re individually wrapped,” she said. “It’s not ideal. We’ve all taste-tested them, really not ideal, but they’re not bad.”
The parish has celebrated Communion online, “but to do it together is more of a sign that we’re a community,”
Child said. “So this will be the first time we’ve been able to do it as a community in a year.”
She said the Easter message is important this year. “In the midst of things that are really bad, it’s important that there was this one really good thing that happened,” she said. “The resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us hope.”
Lisa Latham of Guilford said her parish, Zion Episcopal in North Branford, said Easter will be celebrated outdoors, “as long as the weather’s good.” Most members are “just not comfortable coming back in the sanctuary right now,” she said. “It’s a beautiful sanctuary, but it’s small and people are not comfortable being that close.”
On Easter, there will be a morning service and an afternoon Communion service, both outdoors. With “people getting vaccinated and the weather turning nicer, it seems like it’s all a fitting renewal to me,” she said.
The Rev. Aidan Donahue, pastor of Precious Blood Parish in Milford, has been holding indoor services since June, when Archbishop Leonard Blair gave his approval. “The people have been very cooperative,” Donahue said. “We’ve been very careful with cleaning the church.” Still, “we expect that we will not get the crowds we would get for Palm Sunday and Easter.”
The parish’s two churches, St. Mary and St. Agnes, drew 2,000 worshipers during a weekend before the pandemic. Now, there are 700 to 800, he said. “As more people are vaccinated, the risk even goes down further and people are starting to come back,” Donahue said.
The Rev. Don Carpenter, pastor of Evangelical Baptist Church in Torrington, said that while his congregation has been meeting in person for a while, he’s letting people know Gov. Ned Lamont has lifted the limit on the number of people in church, as long as they stay 6 feet part. “I used it as a bit of a come-out-tochurch thing,” Carpenter said.
Evangelical Baptist recently began holding Bible
study and other meetings in person, as well. “We are still social distancing and we’re still requiring masks in the building,” Carpenter said.
“Folks have been faithful with online attendance and Facebook Live and all of that, but they love to get together and sing,” he said. “Obviously we’re still wearing masks.” On Easter Sunday, “we’re launching a three-week series called ‘This is Love’ about how the Lord has demonstrated his love through the Easter story,” he said.
There also will be an Easter egg hunt. “Everything is wrapped and everybody will be all spread out, but we are having a little fun thing for the kids outside,” Carpenter said.