Special Events at CEC

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31: Trunk or Treat

5 – 6:30 p.m. in the CEC French St. Parking lot behind the FMC. Christ Church is once again hosting our annual Trunk or Treat on Halloween evening to provide a fun, safe, family-friendly event for our neighbors and schools. Plan to be part of the fun. We need parishioners to decorate their cars and come hand out candy to all the little goblins. Bring your kids and grandkids as well. Contact Karen Von Der Bruegge (karenv@cecsa.org) to reserve a parking space for your “trunk”.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2: All Saints Sunday 2025

The adult choir and a 21-piece orchestra will offer special music on All Saints’ Sunday and the 9 & 11 a.m. services. Along with past years' favorites, the featured work, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” by John Rutter, is guaranteed to raise the roof with a full-blown arrangement of this spiritual classic.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2: All Souls Service - Commemoration of All Faithful Departed

Join us at 5 p.m. in the evening for our All Souls Service as we remember and honor those who have passed away this year. During the service, we will read aloud the names of the departed. If you have lost a loved one this past year and would like their name included, please submit it to Karen at karenv@cecsa.org by October 24.

All Saints and All Souls Explained:

In the New Testament, the word “saints” is used to describe the entire membership of the Christian community, and in the Collect for All Saints’ Day the word “elect” is used in a similar sense. From very early times, however, the word “saint” came to be applied primarily to persons of heroic sanctity, whose deeds were recalled with gratitude and admiration by later generations.
Beginning in the tenth century, it became customary to set aside another day on which the church remembered that vast body of the faithful who, though no less members of the company of the redeemed, are unknown in the wider fellowship of the church. It was also a day for particular remembrance of family members and friends. Although those in this wider body of the faithful are no less part of the communion of saints than those persons whose particular sanctity is celebrated on All Saints’ Day, the liturgical mood of the two days is nevertheless quite different, as the joy and exultation of All Saints’ Day transitions to the much more personal remembrances and griefs of All Souls’ Day.
Although the observance of All Souls’ Day was abolished at the Reformation because of abuses connected with masses for the dead, a renewed understanding of its meaning has led to a widespread acceptance of this commemoration among Anglicans, and to its inclusion as an optional observance in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.

*This information about All Souls Day is from Lesser Feasts & Fasts, 2022, an official book of liturgies approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church.