Westserve

Good Friday Church

This is my first Easter at SWAC, and I was interested in how the most significant event in the Christian calendar would be celebrated.

We do a substantial letterbox drop to the area (~8000 flyers) with details of Easter meetings and some tract-type text.
The first event of the week was the Great Easter Debate last Monday, between a member of the Australian Skeptics and Barry Newman, a Christian science educator.
These have a something of a history at Springwood, but numbers have dropped off badly the last couple of years. A shame really, because it was a very good night. Peter Bowditch, the sceptic, wasn’t very well prepared, whereas Barry was. But the whole evening was good humoured, and a number of very good gospel conversations afterward.

Yesterday was Good Friday, and apart from 8:00am Communion at Christ Church, the main meeting is a combined effort, with all 11 congregations encouraged to come.
Bishop Rob Forsyth spoke on the weekend’s theme: “Easter: death of hope or hope thru death” and the crowd numbered about 550 with children.
I still struggle with the logistics of these kind of numbers. One of my jobs was to organise the preparation and distribution of the bread and grape juice for the Lord’s Supper. To my surprise, it went very smoothly. The twenty people I arranged to help take the elements to people in their seats did a great job and the whole task only took around 8 minutes.

The atmosphere was great, and lots of people hung around after and chatted over hot cross buns, tea and coffee.
A really good, biblically-focussed celebration of Jesus’ death for us.

A few shots of the crowd at Good Friday: