Easter 2025

Original Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash

Disciples History Moment for April 20, 2025

Disciples don’t celebrate Easter. Except, of course, we do. We do and we don’t. Or maybe more accurately we didn’t but now we do.

Disciples have been called a New Testament Church, and so, from its founding, the New Testament, rather than the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible), provided the template for what the church should believe, how it should govern itself, and how it should practice according to Alexander Campbell, one of our founding fathers. We used clever slogans to describe our beliefs: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” and only use “Bible words for Bible things.”

Using this line of thinking, in the beginning of the Disciples' movement, since we didn’t find the word p-i-a-n-o in the New Testament, “pianos” were not allowed in churches. The list of things "not allowed" following this theology could go on and on. For example, the New Testament doesn’t speak hymnals with music, but we use them today!

Along the same line of thinking, the New Testament doesn’t explicitly command religious holidays like Christmas or Easter. So, Campbell believed EVERY Sunday was to be celebrated as a day to commemorate and celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, and to not single out specific Sundays!

To make things even more complicated, there is a long history of divergent Easter observance, and it has been a troubling issue of controversy between various denominations. In the Western churches, Easter is observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the Spring Equinox. In the East, Easter observance is based on the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. And it helps to know if you are using a Julian or Gregorian calendar. You could also use a complicated mathematical formula. It just so happens that, for this year, for both Western and Eastern Churches, Easter is on April 20th (that’s unusual, usually they fall on different Sundays!)

But, this all just makes things needlessly complicated. That’s one of the reasons early Disciples shied away from setting an Easter date. Today, we have musical notes in hymnals, have pianos in churches, honor differing forms of baptism than what we read about in the New Testament, don’t require wine at the Lord’s Supper, and celebrate Easter when most other churches celebrate it.

Back in the early days of our denomination, we also had a slogan that said, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials liberty, and in all things love.” Whether we celebrate Easter on Easter Sunday or celebrate Easter every Sunday is a non-essential for Disciples. We don’t need to make it into another controversy.

Let’s just love because of Jesus’ love of everyone, regardless of when others celebrate Easter, because Love is an essential … and THAT IS IN THE BIBLE! This is why “welcome all and exclude none.”

Rev. Kevin K. Adams