Ecumenical Adventures

He is Rise!!!! Hallelujah!!! Happy Easter!!!!!

What an amazing day today, Easter Day in Kolkata! This morning was a pretty typical, but very pleasant service at the Circular Road Baptist Church next door to the BMS compound. It was the afternoon that really made the whole day and was the highlight of the trip for me thus far. My partner in crime Paul and I were invited to attend an Easter Day parade. The parade consisted of several churches meeting and then individually marching to one of the large parks in the city, joining up along the route to create a huge body of people walking, singing, praising God and giving out tracts to the locals. It was the first event of it’s kind in over 30 years in the city, the last one sadly ending in a bit of a riot due to some non-Christian interlopers, and drew a huge crowd of onlookers, Christians and the local press.

The march ended, after 2km in 100deg heat and 90% humidity, in the city park with a huge worship concert of about 2,000 Christians. It was an amazing event and a great privilege to be part of, I shall remember it for the rest of my life and the joy of it still rests in my heart. There were a couple of things that were a pleasant surprise during the evening, the first was seeing a number of nuns from the Missionaries of Charity Order – the Order that Mother Theresa belonged to – joining in with the concert. I didn’t expect to be sitting next to a couple of nun’s, in a park in Kolkata, worshipping Jesus! The second, and most poignant was the fact that the entire event was the brainchild of a senior catholic clergyman who had worked to bring together Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Assemblies of God, Greek Orthodox and Syrian Orthodox denominations to celebrate Easter Sunday in this way. The Psalmist wrote “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” and this event was a marvelous display of Christian unity even more surprising for me that it was a Catholic who was the force behind it, so often the church, particularly the Catholic’s, invite bad press by their comments that do not express unity. This was an amazing example of how the church, the entire church of God, can come together in unity to worship God. What a spectacle!!!!