A Good Friday Love Feast

Recently I was pleased to learn that the Moravian church continues to practice lovefeasts, and that they traditionally do so on Good Friday.

The motto of the Moravian church: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love"

A lovefeast service is dedicated to the ideal of Christian love, and is based on the agape feasts of the early church–you know, where the early Christians had all things in common and had their meals together every day.

The Moravian Church in North America describes the lovefeast this way:

The lovefeast of Apostolic times was resuscitated in its original simplicity by the Moravian Church in 1727. After the memorable celebration of the holy communion on August 13, seven groups of the participants continued to talk over the great spiritual blessing which they had experienced and were reluctant to separate and return to their own homes for the noonday meal. Count Zinzendorf, sensing the situation, sent them food from his manor house, and each group partook together, continuing in prayer, religious conversation, and the singing of hymns. This incident reminded Zinzendorf of the primitive agape, and the idea was fostered until lovefeasts became a custom in Moravian life.

"our lamb has conquered; let us follow him"

Lovefeast services will serve coffee and a sweet bun (yum! coffee in church!) and involve a good deal of singing, and the goal of lovefeasts is the strengthening and celebrating harmony, goodwill, friendship, and unity while leaving behind old wrongs.

This sounds like a beautiful way to observe Good Friday. Tell me, what do you do?

{Have a blessed Easter weekend, dear readers! See you Monday!}

About these ads

5 thoughts on “A Good Friday Love Feast

  1. Pingback: Christian News

  2. “Lovefeast services will serve coffee and a sweet bun (yum! coffee in church!)” I think the sweet bun makes it double yum, Rachel!

    The very small chapel (6-10 people) I attended in England when I became a Christian served communion with a common cup. They filled it with a very decent Port. It was tough to leave any for the next person.

    Later I attended a church where the communion bread was really delicious puffy honey glazed flat bread. It was perforated top to bottom and side to side into a sheet of 1 inch squares. I always wanted to rip a whole strip of squares off, right down the line. I resisted the temptation; it was communion, after all.

    Happy Easter, Rachel. I am off next week, so don’t know how often I can come by EwJ to visit, but I’ll jump back in when possible!

    Tim

    • Hope you have a great Easter week, Tim! Enjoy the time off.

      Someday you should tell the story of becoming a Christian in England! Unless you already have?

      • That’s funny, Rachel but I haven’t even thought of posting about it. It’s kind of wild in some respects. May be I should. Not sure where it would best fit though …

        Tim

  3. Not sure if it’s the same thing as a lovefeast, but we are having a “sonrise” service outside (since it’s at 9:00″ followed by breakfast afterwards together at church before we have our morning service on Easter.

    I’m saddened to see many churches do not have anything on Good Friday at all. I identify with the Easter story so much when we have a solemn Friday service followed by a joyous Easter Sunday.

Please Join the Conversation!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s