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With Holy Week well underway and Easter fast approaching, members of both Bainbridge Church and Bainbridge First Church of God gathered on Wednesday evening to hold a special service: a Passover Seder. While Bainbridge First Church of God has held these before, this marks the first time Bainbridge Church has held one. Laddie De Rocco, Bainbridge Church pastor, sat down with the Post-Searchlight to explain the service.

“When it comes to Holy Week… we’ve done a couple of other things, like a Maundy Thursday service, we’ve done Good Friday services, but we’ve never done a Passover Seder,” he said. A Passover Seder is the traditional Jewish Passover meal, along with its accompanying religious traditions. “As far as our traditions, it’s one of the oldest traditions… technically it’s not a Christian tradition, it’s a Jewish tradition,” DeRocco continued. “But since Christians believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Passover Lamb, then we celebrate it and do a Passover Seder different than an Orthodox Jewish person would. We put Jesus into the story all along the way.”

While some of the traditional foods of a Passover Seder were present, such as matzah and charoset, some substitutions were made. “We didn’t do lamb, it’s a little expensive,” DeRocco laughed. “So we had the meat House prepare some chicken wings, to symbolically represent the lamb.”

Additionally, the service was shorter than a traditional Seder. “We did as much of the traditional Passover as we could, because of time constraints,” he said. “So typically this meal is done with just a single family, a dad, mom and kids, whatever. It’s not done en masse, so because did it with 80 people in the room, we had to condense it so we could get people out within an hour.” The congregation also performed foot washing during the service.

“It was binding together two different congregations,” DeRocco said, “the same body of Christ, but using this amazing 3,000-year-old tradition, and still bringing together people that meet in different houses on Sunday maybe, but we’re all part of that one family, the Family of God.”