Walking to the Tomb Together: Holy Week and Easter for Interchurch Families
Walking to the Tomb Together: Holy Week and Easter for Interchurch Families
Walking to the Tomb Together: Holy Week and Easter for Interchurch Families
There is a moment that many interchurch families know well. It happens at the Communion rail, or the table, or the moment of distribution — whatever your traditions call it. Someone you love moves forward, and you stay in the pew. Or you move forward, and they stay. Holy Week and Easter, of all the seasons in the Christian year, make that moment feel both sharper and, strangely, more bearable. Because the whole story we are walking through is about precisely this: death, separation, the unbearable waiting, and what breaks through on the other side.
Holy Week is not one thing. It is a gathering of experiences — triumphal and terrifying, intimate and cosmic — and different Christian traditions enter it through different doors. Some families mark Palm Sunday with a full liturgical procession, palms in hand, in one tradition, and a simple gospel reading and reflection in another. Maundy Thursday may mean a Seder-influenced Last Supper meal in one church, a solemn stripping of the altar in another, foot-washing in a third. Good Friday could bring the Stations of the Cross, a Three Hours devotion, a plain service of readings, or a walk of witness through town with Christians from every denomination on the street together — which is often where interchurch families feel most themselves.
For many of us, Holy Week is actually the week when being an interchurch family feels most visible. Because the services multiply. Because the question of where you worship together, and where you worship separately, has to be answered again, practically, in the diary. Some couples divide the week: she attends the Tenebrae at her Catholic parish, he attends the Good Friday service at his Methodist chapel. Some go to everything, developing a Holy Week stamina that is exhausting and somehow also grace-filled. Some find the one ecumenical service in the area and plant themselves there with relief.
Children in interchurch families often absorb something important from this navigation that we don't always name explicitly: that the same story is being told, with passion and sincerity, in many different rooms. The cross at the centre of Good Friday is the same cross. The empty tomb at the heart of Easter is the same tomb. What differs is the texture of how we approach it — the particular prayers, the music, the ceremonial — and those differences are not nothing. They carry centuries of lived faith. But they do not divide the story itself.
The particular ache of Easter Communion
Easter Sunday is, in most traditions, the high feast of the Eucharist. It is the Sunday of Sundays. And for interchurch families where the question of sharing Communion is unresolved — or resolved only partially, or differently in different contexts — it can carry a particular ache. To be at the altar rail on Easter morning and not receive together feels, on this of all days, like a wound.
We do not say this to make it heavier than it already is. We say it because it is true, and because AIF exists partly to hold that truth with honesty, rather than smooth it over with easy reassurance. The hope of full visible unity between our churches is an Easter hope — it belongs to the theology of resurrection, to the not-yet that we trust is coming. Living in an interchurch family is, in one sense, living in that not-yet every week. Holy Week simply makes it more legible.
Some interchurch families have found ways to mark Easter Communion together that honour their different traditions — attending both churches, receiving in the tradition that permits it, offered a blessing in the other. Some have found that particular parishes or congregations extend a welcome that their official denominational position does not quite reach. Some wait, year after year, with a patience that is itself a form of faith.
Holy Saturday and the grace of in-between
There is one day in Holy Week that interchurch families may find speaks to their experience with unexpected directness: Holy Saturday.
Holy Saturday is the day between. The disciples do not yet know what Sunday will bring. The tomb is sealed. The story appears to have ended in the worst possible way. And yet they wait. They do not yet have the resolution. They are holding grief and, somewhere beneath it, a hope they cannot yet name or trust.
Interchurch families often live in a version of that Saturday space. The full unity of our churches has not yet come. The Communion table is not yet fully shared. The theological conversations continue, with genuine movement and genuine frustration in roughly equal measure. We are not yet at Easter morning — not the Easter morning of visible, structural unity. But we are past Good Friday. Something irreversible has happened in the love between people of different traditions who have built lives and families and faith together. That is not nothing. That is, in its own way, resurrection already at work.
What Easter asks of us
Easter does not ask interchurch families to pretend the divisions don't exist. It asks something harder and more interesting: to live as resurrection people within the reality of those divisions. To keep showing up to both churches. To keep praying for unity that we may not live to see in its fullness. To raise children who know, in their bones, that the Body of Christ is larger than any single tradition, and that love across difference is not a compromise but a vocation.
The earliest Easter proclamation was not a theological argument. It was a startled announcement: he is not here. He is risen. Go and tell.
Interchurch families have their own version of that announcement to make — simply by existing, by loving across denominational lines, by raising children in the breadth of the Christian family rather than its narrowness. In a world that still finds it easy to retreat into tribal certainty, that witness matters.
This Easter, wherever your family worships — in whatever combination of traditions, in whatever mix of services and silences and Communion received and longed for — you are part of a story larger than your own. The tomb is empty. The waiting is not the end.
A blessed and holy Easter to all AIF families, wherever you are.
MJCarroll -Executive Officer of the Association of Interchurch Families.
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The Association of Interchurch Families supports couples and families from different Christian traditions. If you would like to connect with others who share your experience, or access our resources on interchurch family life, visit www.interchurchfamilies.org.uk
