What to know about Watchnight Services
Happy New Year’s Eve!
Issue #208 Friday Funday December 29, 2022
Watchnight Services, also known as Watchnight Masses, Watchnight Vespers Services, and Watchnight Vigils, are common occurrences in many Christian denominations. The various types of services are held late in the evening of New Year’s Eve, purposefully lasting until after midnight.
Watchnight Services are intended to give the churchgoers the opportunity to review the past year, make confessions, and prepare for the upcoming year with prayers, resolutions, singing, preaching, and partaking of Holy Communion.
Watchnight Services are also intended to replace the partying, drinking, and revelry of other New Year’s Eve celebrations with glorifying God instead.
Watchnight Services in the African-American community has had an additional significance since the days of the Civil War.
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The History of Watchnight Services in African-American Churches
Almost none of the Africans stolen from their home countries and sold into slavery in the Americas were Christians. Many of them were Muslims, while the majority of them practiced their indigenous religions with their own traditions and types of gods.
The newly enslaved Africans were then forced to convert to Christianity and again developed their own worship styles and traditions, hoping that would quell any slave uprisings. However the enslavers and colonizers also feared that the opposite of submission would occur, and actually passed laws that prohibited religious exercises or worship services without their owners or the owners’ representatives there to observe and oversee the activities.
Despite these laws, enslaved people sought to exercise their own religious customs, including Christianity, Islam, and indigenous faith practices reflective of the homes from which they were stolen. Services were held at praise houses on plantations or secretly gathered in the woods. “Hush Harbors,” which provided coverage with bushes and trees, allowed the Africans, enslaved and free, to practice their faith.
The enslaved were under constant surveillance, even during worship services on Sundays, their only “day off” during the week.
Watchnight Services for 1862-1863
In September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared enslaved people in the Confederate States legally free. The Executive Order did not include all slaves and was poised to take effect on January 1, 1863.
On the night of December 31, 1862, enslaved and free African Americans gathered, many necessarily in secret, to ring in the new year and await news that the Emancipation Proclamation had actually taken effect.
Therefore, in many African American churches, Watchnight is also known as “Freedom’s Eve.” Today, Watch Night is an annual New Year’s Eve tradition that includes a countdown to midnight, the memory of slavery and freedom, reflections on faith, preaching about the hope of the future, and the overall celebration of African American community and strength.
African American Watchnight Services are a continuation of generations of faith brought from the Motherland and continuing into our future in America for renewal and true freedom.
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