Sharing the Easter experience with the community

Rather than waiting for members of their local community to come to their churches over Easter, Lutherans in Canberra have brought Holy Week to life for those they live and work alongside – in a local park.

For the past couple of years, Jacob Traeger and the church planting community he leads in Canberra’s Molonglo Valley have put on an Easter egg hunt for local families in Ridgeline Park, where they also hold Easter day dawn services and other events.

But looking ahead in mid-2023, they decided to plan an event that would ‘engage people more in the Easter story’. Dubbed Experience Easter and held the day before Palm Sunday, it featured six ‘stations’ from Holy Week around the park and drew more than 80 people from a variety of cultural and faith backgrounds. Having secured council permission to go ahead, the planning team advertised the event in the park and local shops and businesses.

‘We had interactive stations that told the stories of the entry to Jerusalem, the Passover meal, Jesus arrest, Peter’s denial, the cross and the empty tomb’, explains Jacob, whose 15-strong missional community was joined by 20 volunteers from Molonglo Valley Gospel Community’s sending church Immanuel Woden Valley and Holy Cross Lutheran Church Belconnen for the event.

‘The entry to Jerusalem was where people were welcomed. We had some people with palm leaves cheering them as they walked around. Then they’d go across to the Passover meal where they would be served some food – bitter herbs, with olive oil and gluten-free flatbread. There were also some golden raisins from Iran and one family who came through when they were told that, said “Oh, we’re Iranian”. So that was a cool moment and a real point of connection.

‘Jesus arrest was the next station and there was a drama there and a reflective activity where people could write something hopeful on a stone, and reflect on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and kind of feel the weight of that moment.

‘There was also a drama for Peter’s denial. There was an opportunity for people to write things that bring them worry, because the reflective question was, “Well, why do you think Jesus denied Peter?” And so, for kids, we were asking whether there have been times that they’ve done something but not wanted to admit it, and why that was.

‘But even though we were thinking mostly about the kids with the interactive activities, there was one moment where they all just sat there and so my wife Kate, who was running that station, said, “Any of the parents can write things down too”. And that really opened some things up. There were a couple of people who said, “You don’t have enough paper for all of my worries”.’ Jacob says it provided an opening for the volunteers to engage with the visitors.

The station of the cross was at the high point of the park, along with a crown of thorns, a sponge and a stick with vinegar. ‘We were able to talk there about how it’s the saddest part of the story, but also that the cross has become a symbol of hope for Christians because we know that that’s not where the story ends’, Jacob says.

At the cross, children were able to colour in a cross with symbols of hope.

At the empty tomb, Jacob explained that the women went to the tomb anxious and afraid and found there was no body, but that this is where Christians get hope. ‘Because we know that if Jesus has gone through those darkest moments for those who trust in him, we know that God is still with us when we go through those moments’, he says.

‘We gave people some Easter eggs at the beginning and some at the end. The ones at the end were hollow, so I was able to talk about how that reminds us of the empty tomb. And that resonated for a lot of kids and even some parents.’

Jacob says that it was ‘really cool to see people connecting’ with Experience Easter and the fact they weren’t put off by it being ‘a more overtly Christian thing’ than the previous community events they have run. It even gave at least one Christian visitor the chance to share the Easter story with others.

‘The first lady who came through was a Chinese lady who spoke very little English, but we were blessed to have a couple of Mandarin speakers among our volunteers’, he says. ‘That lady brought somebody along who she’d met that morning to tell them the Easter story. And then she came back with a couple of other people. She was the first person to come along and that really excited people who were involved.

‘A few people commented that it was really good to be able to interact with the story and have things to touch and taste and see – that it brought it alive in a different way.’