Annual Way of the Cross Walk set for Good Friday

Mission Coalition has once again planned the annual Way of the Cross Walk on Friday (Good Friday) for residents to participate in the 14 stations of the cross during Easter weekend.

Starting at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 223 E. Fourth St. N., at noon, “humanity” along with the cross will travel through seven centrally located churches experiencing two stations of the cross at each stop before concluding at the First Christian Church.

First Presbyterian Church, United Presbyterian Church, First United Methodist Church and Congregational United Church of Christ will host the remaining stops with volunteers from those churches and many more participating in the event.

Mission Coalition is a group of churches in the Newton area.

“We try to do things to serve the community and worship God. Newton is in a unique situation of having a concentration of churches right there close together. It makes it easy to do cooperative things. It became fairly easy to adapt the 14 stations of the cross in the traditional Catholic churches process to the seven churches that are collected close together,” event organizer Linda Curtis-Stolper said. “We do two stations at each church, and it is a wonderful way to take some time to think about what it is that happened on Good Friday and about the walk that Jesus took for all of us.”

The event starts at St. Stephen’s with an introductory reading along with the first two stops followed by a prayer and song before following the cross to the next church. Anyone is invited to participate and the group recognizes that people may have to work and attend at various times.

“We understand that there are going to be some people that get there late and some people that are going to have to leave early, and that is absolutely OK,” Curtis-Stolper said.

The program that is being used is adapted from Clarence Enzler’s “Everyman’s Way of the Cross.” Curtis-Stolper said that idea behind the journey came from followers original pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

“The idea of the way of the cross came from the middle ages and people wanting to make pilgrimages for worship purposes. There aren’t that many people that were able to go to Jerusalem and follow the actual footsteps,” Curtis-Stopler said. “The Franciscans in the 1300s kind of formalized the stops that people could do in Jerusalem. As the order grew they started developing alternate paths that people could follow if they couldn’t go to Jerusalem. That is where the station of the cross came into the Catholic churches.”

Curtis-Stopler said in 1991 Pope John Paul II came up with a different set of 14 stations called the scriptural way of the cross which are all based on scripture. She is currently working on developing a booklet based on the scriptural way to hopefully be used in the future.