Isn’t Halloween evil?
For many of us we have been taught that Christians do not celebrate Halloween. Traditionally we have done and continue to do light parties at church to invite our friends to.
But what about those who walk past our homes every 31st October?
We have often thought of Halloween as what the world does, to celebrate evil, to celebrate all that is dark in the world, after all it is a pagan festival.
After being inspired by Nay Dawson when she came to St Mary’s as part of the Everyday Evangelism Conference, I decided to use Halloween to reach out to my local community by being a ‘light’ house in the dark.
When I was younger Halloween was always a family event, we did apple bobbing, funny games and door knocking (without being told off). It was a fun day of dressing up, it was never about celebrating evil.
After the conference I began to do some research, Glen Scrivener has a great poetry video he created a few years ago explaining the true roots of Halloween. It began in the fourth century where Christian children would dress up in ghoulish outfits to mock evil, to celebrate the devil’s disarmament under the power of Christ’s death and resurrection. It was the eve of All Hallows’ Day, All Saints’ Day, the eve of getting ready to celebrate the light of Christ.
Halloween itself means to be holy minded or to desire holiness. It was meant to be an honest reflection of the Christian life rescued from the darkness and brought into the light of Christ… we earnestly sing today ‘O death where is your sting? Where is your victory?’ – this is the original heart of Halloween.
And like Glen I thought it was time to reclaim it.
Becoming part of our local community
What I love about Halloween, is that mums and dads join in, it is an opportunity as a family to knock on neighbours’ doors and see who has a lovely treat for them. There seems to be a Halloween code that if there are no lights on then don’t knock at that house. It is the houses that there is a light on that get the attention!
I love being the house where the children know they will get a treat and a smile.
However last year I decided I wanted to declare to these families that Jesus is the light. Hence the creation of the ‘spider web challenge’. The theme came from the booklets published by 10ofthose about the things we are afraid of. Instead of the standard Christian tracts condemning families for taking part in Halloween these tracts focused on what we are afraid of, including the dark, spiders and all things spooky. My theme became ‘I am not afraid because Jesus is the light’.
How to bring hope to Halloween
I created a spider web challenge on my driveway for the children to scramble through (many parents joined in) and collect a gift bag hanging on the fence. I didn’t have too many scary things just spiders and cobwebs. In the bag were a couple of sweet treats, a Bible verse pencil, a tract, local church information and also my blog advert (livinghisword.life), as a means to open people to the idea that Jesus meets with us in normal everyday moments of life. I spent £2 per bag and I filled 60 bags.
Within one hour all 60 bags were gone and all the time I was wearing a glow in the dark T-shirt declaring that Jesus is the light. The families were amazed that the children were given something to do other than ringing on the doorbell / door knocking, at one point I had a queue with people waiting to have a turn. It wasn’t about putting them on the spot to make a decision about Jesus, it was creating an environment to demonstrate Jesus’ love for my local community and give them an opportunity to consider that Jesus is a real person who has something to say to them.
I am in this for the long term and now instead of going away over half term I will make sure that I am back in time for the spider web challenge.
My neighbours haven’t all of a sudden wanted to know about Jesus but I have made first steps into being known as the ‘Jesus’ lady.
What would be incredible is if we can bring this theme to a variety of different areas across Maidenhead. The incredible thing about this message is that everyone is afraid of something, so it is a message of hope for every single person, we don’t have to persuade them that this is true but offer them the hope that darkness never has the final say because… Jesus is the light.
Practical steps
It costs money to do this, apart from the decorations I spent £120 on the gifts bags and contents. I also created tshirts and stickers for the bags with the ‘I am not afraid of the dark because… Jesus is the light’ theme.
I think it is good to be seen as generous rather than just the opportunity to tell people about Jesus as it reflects God’s generosity towards us. I know that much of what we do at St Mary’s, we want to be self-funding; however, I think most evangelist events do incur costs. I think this is something we need to pray about and come to a mind about.
I do this on my own so it may be good to have others to help, maybe hand out leaflets to parents as they wait or ask opening faith questions. We could also carry this theme into the light festival and create crafts for the children to do.
Whatever we choose to do as a church it will be wonderful to demonstrate to our local community that Jesus moves towards them rather than they are too far gone for him.