Happy Easter from Cape Town!

How to spend Easter in Cape Town? Usually Claudia sings with her choir during the church service, but Germany is far away… When we recently had a walk along Main Road in Sea Point a church attracted our attention with some kind of luminous advertising announcing the worship on Easter Sunday…

Sea Point Evangelical Congregational Church in Cape Town announcing Easter Sunday worship

When I took the picture a man told us that the people sing and dance in this church, so we decided to visit the worship to experience a church service that might be different to those in Germany.

We arrived at the Sea Point Evangelical Congregational Church 15 minutes before the service began, and we were warmly welcomed by an elderly lady at the entrance.We sat down in a row somewhere in the back of the church – nobody wants to sit in the first row, you know… The church looked quite “normal”, without any golden deco, very similar to most of the german evangelic churches. There was nothing really special, except some commemorative plaques on the walls which reminded of some members of the congregation who had already passed away.

The congregation was very mixed – a lot of elderly white people, but also not few coloureds and some young black people. A coloured woman asked us if we were visitors and from which country, and she told us about the sacrament which would be celebrated today. In front of the altar some people were singing – that’s very diffferent to worships in Germany where everybody is very quiet until the service begins…

Easter sweet with greeting

The reverend looked very evangelic, too (his father was german!). He welcomed all the visitors in the church: from Botswana, Germany, Holland and Korea! The worship itself was quite like a normal german evangelic church service. Only the sacrament was a little bit different because the congregation didn’t share the cup. Everyone was given a litte glass with some red juice, so it looked like as if the whole congregation had a glass of schnaps together… And we received that special Easter sweet which you can see on the other picture while the children had a little Easter egg hunt outside…

Nobody danced. Maybe we missunderstood the man on the road…?!

This post is also available in: German

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 12:00 and is filed under Six months in Mother City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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