Tag Archives: Holy Week

Holy Week at Redeemer

During Holy Week we have Divine Service at 8:30 Monday-Wednesday.

Stations of the Cross is Wednesday night at 7:00.

There is a Matins service Thursday morning. The Maundy Thursday Divine Service is at 7:00 p.m.

Good Friday Tre Ore Service is at noon, divided as follows:

12:00 p.m.    Liturgy of the Catechumens
1:15 p.m.    Liturgy of the Holy Communion
2:15 p.m.    Vespers

Holy Saturday Matins is at 10:30 a.m., and the Easter Vigil is at 8:30 p.m.

Easter Sunday there will be one service at 10:30 a.m. The Easter breakfast will begin at 8:30 a.m., and the Sunday School Easter Egg Hunt is at 9:15.

Easter at Redeemer

There will be one service on Easter Sunday at 10:30. Get here early, because parking will be tight!

The Easter breakfast will be at 9:00 and is a potluck this year. We have received a grant from Thrivent in support of it as a fundraiser for missions in China.

Holy Week Schedule

There are Holy Communion services at 8:30 a.m., Monday through Thursday.

Wednesday, 13 April
7:00 p.m. Stations of the Cross

Thursday, 14 April Maundy Thursday
7:00 p.m. Divine Service

Friday, 15 April, Good Friday
12:00 p.m. Tre Ore 12:00 p.m. Liturgy of the Catechumens
1:15 p.m. Liturgy of the Holy Communion
2:15 p.m. Vespers

Saturday, 16 April Holy Saturday
10:30 a.m. Matins
8:30 p.m. Easter Vigil

Sunday, 17 April The Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord
9:00 a.m. Easter Breakfast & Egg Hunt
10:30 a.m. Divine Service

Easter at Redeemer

On Holy Saturday, April 3, the Easter Vigil is at 8:30 p.m. It will be livestreamed. The bulletin is here.

On Easter Sunday, April 4, The Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord, there will be Divine Services at 8:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. The 8:00 a.m. service will be livestreamed. Here are the bulletin and Congregation at Prayer.

From April 5-9 daily Divine Services will continue at 8:30 a.m.

Holy Week and Easter Schedule, 2021

There are Divine Services at 8:30 Monday through Thursday.

In addition, on Wednesday, March 31, Stations of the Cross will be at 7:00 p.m.


On Maundy Thursday, April 1, there will be a 7:00 p.m. Divine Service.


On Good Friday, April 2, the Tre Ore begins at noon. For those who may want to attend only part of it, the starting times for each section are as follows:
12:00 p.m. Liturgy of the Catechumens
1:15 p.m. Liturgy of the Holy Communion
2:15 p.m. Vespers


On Holy Saturday, April 3, there is a 10:30 a.m. Matins service and, at 8:30 p.m., the Easter Vigil.


On Easter Sunday, April 4, The Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord, there will be Divine Services at 8:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.

From April 5-9 daily Divine Services will continue at 8:30 a.m.

Holy Week and Easter services 2020

In an attempt to keep things as simple as possible for all of you, we have decided to put all of the information and links for the Holy Week and Easter services into this one post. It will be divided by day, with links to both current and past bulletins and past services for each day.

On Maundy Thursday, the Divine Service will be livestreamed at 7:00 p.m. You can find that, as always, on the Redeemer Fort Wayne YouTube channel. The bulletin for that services is linked here. If you would like to watch last year’s service with the stripping of the altar, the bulletin for that is here. (Don’t let the 2018 label at the beginning of the video confuse you, it is definitely last year’s service.)

On Good Friday, the Divine Service will be livestreamed at 12:30 p.m. The bulletin for this year’s service is here. Last year’s Tre Ore service is available and the bulletin for that is here. (Again, don’t let the 2018 label at the beginning of the video confuse you, it is last year’s service.)

We will not be having an Easter Vigil this year. Last year’s Easter Vigil is available here and the bulletin for that is here.

On Easter Sunday we will celebrate The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ at 10:30 a.m. That service will be livestreamed. The bulletin is here. Last year’s Easter service is here and the bulletin is available here.

Letter from Pastor Petersen regarding Holy Week

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Thank you for your ongoing prayers and support. I have been constantly impressed by your compassion for one another and your concern for the Church through these past weeks. There is no real guide from the Church’s history on how to deal with this. Our pastors are trying to be faithful to our calling while being as careful and safe as possible. I expect that five years from now we’ll know better what we should have done. For now, though some have expressed doubt about its expertise and validity, we continue to adhere strictly to the CDC recommendations.

Whatever your opinions on these measures, I ask you to continue in the gentle kindness and compassion for one another and for our pastors. Let us not judge one another, but recognize that we are in uncharted territory and all have unique circumstances.

For the immediate future, including holy week, barring changes from the CDC or the government, we will continue to offer the Sacrament to our people who are healthy, comfortable with our measures, and desire it. We will put up a separate post outlining the precautions that we are taking during these services. In order to ensure we don’t have more than 10 people, including children and the pastor, at a service, we need people to sign up for the services.

We are asking people to limit themselves to one reception of communion for the first part of Holy Week, from Saturday April 4 through Wednesday April 8, then to once during Maundy Thursday through Holy Saturday, and again once in the three days of Easter through Easter Tuesday. We will Livestream all the major feasts and encourage everyone to make use of those. In other words, you can’t come on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, but you could come one of those days and watch the Livestream for the other. These services will mostly be spoken services that last about 30 minutes. Even our live streamed services will lack the normal ceremonies that we normally enjoy on those days. They will be simplified in order to recognize the lack of people actually with us, to create space in time for more services, and to optimize the livestream experience. We have, however, good recordings on Youtube from last year’s services. We suggest that people watch those as well. We will also be posting the bulletins.

I doubt that Pastor Frese and I could keep this pace of services without the volunteer help of Dr. Grobien, Dr. Mayes, Rev. Wietfeldt, and Dr. Koontz. They have not only been kind and eager to help, but they have also responded with remarkable swiftness to our requests for their availability. This has made it much easier to plan and coordinate than I thought would ever be possible. So also Jane has been tireless in updating the website, in taking phone calls to schedule people and answer questions, and in dealing with the constant changes we have needed to make. We thank God for all of them. 

Early on in this, we asked Kantor Reuning and Barb to quarantine themselves since they are, statistically, in the most vulnerable population. That quarantine will end on Holy Monday. Kantor will go to extreme lengths to stay safe but will be playing,God willing, for our streamed services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. We thank him for his cooperation and also Maggie Casey and Nicole Busarow who stepped in to play in his absence. We also want to thank the musicians, led by Jason Thompson, who have been so supportive and cooperative throughout this ordeal. 

Pastor Frese and I remain deeply touched by all of you who have been so kind to us and encouraging, so willing to help, and while eager for God’s gifts and disappointed in all that has been cancelled or changed, still so cooperative. The Lord will and the Lord does provide. Jesus lives still. That hasn’t changed. These days will pass, one way or another. Soon they will be not much more than a footnote in history books. In the meantime, these are our lives and the days we have been given. We thank God for them even as we eagerly pray for them to end. 

I hope that you have been able to spend more time in God’s Word these past couple of weeks. At the beginning of this we put out a suggested reading schedule to get through the four accounts of Our Lord’s Passion in the Gospels. That schedule will end on Apr 4. We have added to it the reading of the Passion Harmony over Holy Week and the Easter texts for the first two weeks of Easter from the Easter Vigil and the New Testament. The reality is that most of us  aren’t hearing as much of the Bible as we normally would during Holy Week even with the daily Matins services and other livestreams and that for many of us, it simply hasn’t “felt” very much like Lent. This schedule of readings is meant to address that some but also to embrace what we still have. We have the Word. God be praised for that! This is that which is most essential for our faith and it has not been taken from us. So let us rejoice in it, recognizing that it is a gift, and use it. 

One final thing, we are also making phone calls to all our members. There can’t be more than two or three households where we haven’t had any contact in the last two weeks, but if we missed you it could be that your voicemail is full or we can’t get through for some reason or even that we left a message on the wrong phone number. So would you please call us at the Church office? We want to talk to you, just to check up on you and make sure you know about our Livestreaming, the website, and our services. 

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Petersen