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The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.

Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

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October 29, 2010

The Best Christian Halloween Party

Along with hell houses and harvest fests, might evangelicals consider celebrating All Saints' Day?

Michelle Van Loon, guest blogger

In case you hadn’t noticed the inflatable purple spiders dotting the lawns of suburban neighborhoods or been tempted by those Venti-sized bags of mini Snickers, this Sunday is Halloween. What kind of story will your church tell itself about the holiday?

allsaints.jpg

Shortly after I came to faith in Christ, during my teens, I attended a haunted house sponsored by a parachurch organization. Busloads of youth group kids and their non-Christian friends came to the well-publicized event. The affair offered an in-your-face spiritual confrontation, presenting teens with sensationalized images of gore and death so they would choose life with Jesus. I didn’t disagree with the message being proclaimed, but even my teen self rebelled against the exploitative nature of the event. I felt it turned the horrific realities of death and evil into de-fanged caricatures of themselves.

Fast forward a few years. As a parent, I wanted to help my children navigate a season broadcasting spiritual messages I couldn’t embrace. As many Protestant churches have, our church offered a Harvest Fest alternative party, complete with carnival games, costumes (positive characters only, Bible character preferred), and evangelistic tracts, along with an impressive haul of candy and trinkets. One of the kids called it the “Not Halloween” party.

Hell houses and Not Halloween parties. Is this the best we can do this time of the year?

I began to ask this question in earnest after reading Jon Sweeney’s The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of a Catholic Tradition. Sweeney grew up in a conservative evangelical household. As an adult, he found himself wrestling with questions about the mystery and the historicity of his faith. Though at the time he wrote the book he had not crossed the Tiber, he found his questions affirmed in some of the writings and practices of the Catholic Church. Sweeney discovered unlikely companions by connecting with the lives of some of the flesh-and-blood members of the church over the past 2,000 years, men and women known as saints.

The book debunks some Protestant myths about Catholic belief, and affirms some others. But its key message is that we have a “cloud of witnesses” surrounding us as we run the race marked for us by God (Heb. 12:1). This cloud is not a two-dimensional background wallpaper but an eternal, living, multi-dimensioned community. And we are part of it.

I did not agree with all of Sweeney’s conclusions. But he got me thinking about how evangelicals have often ridden the pendulum swing like Tarzan as far away from the topic of saints because of what we are not — Catholic — instead of who we are. God calls his children saints.

saintsinglory.jpg

October 31, also known as All Hallows’ Eve, is the warm-up act for All Saints' Day on November 1. Evangelicals without a liturgical background may not know much about All Saints' Day (to learn more, read these CT articles). If ever there was a generation of people sorely in need of spiritual role models, we are it. No matter how we choose to observe Halloween, those of us attending non-liturgical churches can take a modest step toward telling ourselves a different kind of story this Sunday. Pastors might include the story of a saint in their sermons. Parents could make a point to share the story of a saint or two.

Of course we can engage with these stories throughout the year, but there is great value in intentionally joining with other believers worldwide and throughout the centuries in a “Memorial Day” of sorts that belongs uniquely to us. We belong to a fellowship that includes the sometimes-stumbling biblical matriarch Sarah; the fiery intensity of Stephen, the first Christian martyr; the contemplative longings of John of the Cross; the missionary zeal of Amy Carmichael; and countless others known only to God.

More, All Saints' Day is not about remembering just the saints with brand recognition. It's designed to thank God for the gift of a praying great-grandma in our family tree, a friend who sacrificially provided for his family by working two jobs before he died of cancer at age 42, and an anonymous old woman who quietly fed the poor in Jesus’ name when she thought no one was watching.

As we remember, The Book of Common Prayer offers a 79-word way to respond:

Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Your Son, Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow Your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

As we remember, we affirm that we are bound together with all the saints in Christ. All Saints' Day is the one Halloween party the church alone can throw.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty on October 29, 2010 12:00 PM

Comments

We have new neighbors that are campus missionaries. They could have boycotted Halloween and made a statement by only having a Harvest Party at a church. Instead, they cleared out their garage and served cider and donuts to all of us Trick-or-Treaters. It was an amazing act of hospitality, and now, they know all of the neighbors.

Posted By: LivewithFlair | October 29, 2010 12:14 PM

I love this post! And I so want to read that book.

Posted By: Gina | October 29, 2010 12:55 PM

My church always does "reverse trick-or-treating." Since Trick or Treat is the one night people expect strangers to come to their homes, we send our youth out with something for the people. One year it was 9v batteries, another time light bulbs, this year bagged microwave popcorn. Included is a card from the church letting people know that God loves them. This is much better than other programs which simply gather Christians together to entertain each other. * But the point of this piece was a good one. We evangelicals ought to celebrate All Saints' Day.

Posted By: JohnG | October 29, 2010 2:45 PM

As usual, you have brought tears to my eyes. You have also reminded me that no matter how shaky my faith may seem to me at times, the Episcopal and later the Roman Catholic Church have continued nourish me my entire life. Thank you.

Posted By: Nancy | October 29, 2010 8:00 PM

Let's not forget that the 31st Ottober is the day that Luther nailed his 95 theses to door at the church at Wittenburg and started the riformation. This is something that we should celebrate. Christ is our Life let's celebrate Him!

Posted By: Lorenzo Bendlin | October 30, 2010 1:40 AM

Michelle
I agree fully. As a life-long evangelical pastor, I have neglected studying and learning from the great saints. But recently I have discovered them and I have been blessed. Matter-of-fact, this October 31 I will be preaching on the meaning and importance of being a saint. Blessings.

Posted By: Larry | October 30, 2010 10:55 AM

I witness to the children (and parents w/them) by putting a Christian Halloween tract in a snack bag with some candy. I figure they are going to be out regardless on that night going from house to house so have done it this way for the last 3 years or so.

Posted By: Dee Ladd | October 30, 2010 8:30 PM

We will be celebrating All Saints Day tomorrow at our small Presbyterian Church by sharing pictures of our saints. We are all bringing in pictures of our loved ones and honoring them, and their lives in Christianity.

Posted By: Gail O | October 30, 2010 11:04 PM

The author of this article confuses haunted houses (which offer gory Halloween sights and activities) with "Last Days" dramas offered by a number of churches to encourage teens (the ones I know specify a minimum age limit) to consider spiritual realities which they may not have known about. BTW, I actually knew of a church whose youth group conducted a bona fide haunted house for years! Thankfully, that eventually ended when its church members learned the origins of Halloween.

I have no problem with Christians who use October 31, which the majority of people use to celebrate evil, to glorify God by ministering His love and truth to others. At the same time, it can be confusing for small children to understand why others can come to their home and get treats, yet they can not go out trick-and-treating themselves. Small children can also be frightened by gory masks and costumes at their door.

However, if those who are ministering to others don't have children who would be affected by these things, then I can see they might be a powerful witness (though, to be honest, when I was a kid and received those things, I promptly threw them away when I got home.)

After learning of the origins of Halloween some years ago, in Encylopaedia Britannica, the Holy Spirit convicted my heart of aligning myself and my children with activities which are based on horrific pagan/Satanic activities (just one example: "bonfire" is derived from "bone fire".

When we learned that Martin Luther had posted his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, we realized we had found something we could celebrate in good conscience! This is how the Lord has led us.

Posted By: jules | October 30, 2010 11:41 PM

Our church celebrates All Saint's Day - it is a huge event in the community every year and reaches a lot of people.

Posted By: N | October 31, 2010 5:58 PM

the best thing that a believer can do at this or any other festival is follow the Lord's leading and bring glory to His name.

Posted By: archaeologist | November 1, 2010 4:06 AM

Those of you so confident about Luther's 95 theses--you should actually read them for yourself. (Have you?) The Reformation (and certainly the 95 theses) was intended to reform, not split, the Church. But split we have.

Posted By: Mark | November 1, 2010 11:24 AM

As Christians, our greatest "role Model" is our Lord Jesus Christ, and we are saints, according to the Bible. Therefore, Halloween which is a pagan practice, cannot be biblically acceptable to us since it contradicts what the Bible teaches about witchcrafts, spirits, and the dead. We need to celebrate what Christ did for us - not what skeletons and witches, ghosts and pumpkins are about!

Posted By: Cynthia Buhain | November 7, 2010 12:59 PM

In that way of thinking....Halloween being a pagan practice....maybe one should take a step back and take a real good look at the root of the Christmas and Easter holiday. Christmas was started on a bases of over shadowing a pagan holiday. Easter basically the same...a pagan holiday. SOOOO where does that leave Christians? Is not Easter and Christmas viewed as sacred to us because we MADE it that way. Halloween can be the same....it is what WE make it to be. Being a minister myself..many a sermon has been based on this very line of thought. It doesn't matter what the world believes....it is what YOU believe.

Posted By: Rachel | September 7, 2011 12:59 AM

Why do Christians Celebrate what is a truly a pagan "thing"? I am a legal immigrant hence my dislike of what is mostly a fattening of our children with sweet stuff, like candies plus the waste of billions of pumkins, etc., etc., etc. The US spends close to 7 billions in celebration of this "thing"! Please read the following article in Bloomberg entitled: Halloween'sPagan Themes Fill West's Faith Vacuum by: Amity Shlaes dated Oct. 19,2011. Your eyes will open wide as you read it; that is what happened to me, a Christian. Don't Christians have a better way to spend money and time to help the poor and needy of food and mostly hungry for something eternal and not what eventully will be cleaned off, for all eternity! I will for ever be thankfull to Amity Shlaes for writing that excellent article that most certainly pleased Heaven. Amity, keep it up in witnessing for God Almighty.

Posted By: H. D. Schmidt | November 5, 2011 11:44 AM

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