'Praise and thanksgiving': Those at Abundant Faith will usher in New Year in church

The Rev. Jerry Wayne Doss, pastor of Abundant Faith Christian Center, said he couldn't remember a New Year's Eve he wasn't in church.

"My parents (the Rev. Jerry Dean Doss and Curtistine Doss, founders of Victory Temple Church of God in Christ in Springfield) brought me up celebrating what God has done in the current year and praising him for the opportunity to go into a brand new and fresh year," Doss said. "There would always be a lot of celebration, a lot of singing, a lot of clapping, even dancing. Just a blessing."

Doss has carried on the New Year's Eve tradition in most recent years in partnership with Fresh Visions Community Church.

Friday's service, modeled after Watch Night services prevalent in historically Black churches, will be held at Abundant Faith's main campus, 2525 Taylor Avenue, beginning at 10 p.m.

The guest speaker is the Rev. Courtney Carson, one of the high school students expelled in the aftermath of a brawl at a 1999 football game in Decatur. A former drug dealer, Carson is now an elected member of the Decatur school board and an associate pastor at Decatur's Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.

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Also on Friday, at First Presbyterian Church, 321 S. Seventh St., the Abraham Lincoln Association (ALA) will present a reader's performance at 6 p.m. that explains the historic significance of Watch Night, which dates to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.

Lincoln issued the executive order on Sept. 22, 1862, declaring enslaved people in the Confederate states legally free, though it didn't take effect until the new year, so the occasion came to be known as "Watch Night" or “Freedom's Eve.” (The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has original copies of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery with its passage in 1865.)

The free program, which will include a reading of the proclamation and parts of other speeches from historical figures like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, is part of First Night Springfield.

Doss said there will be a combined choir between Abundant Faith and Fresh Visions at the New Year's Eve celebration. Abundant Faith's dance ministry will also perform.

Despite the challenges COVID-19 has presented, Doss said it is a year he and church members are especially thankful for.

"We'll have this dynamic of energy and a lot of praise and thanksgiving," Doss said. "We are so thankful we're still here because a lot of people didn't make it through 2020 or 2021, so it's opportunity to give God praise collectively."

If the notion of spending New Year's Eve in church is a strange notion to some, Doss said they're missing the point.

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It isn't a staid or dour experience, promised Doss. The music will be upbeat, and gatherers will take part in the countdown as midnight approaches, he added.

"It'll be amazing, the volume, the decibels you hear when people are thanking God, especially when we do the countdown," Doss said. "I don't knock the way anyone else celebrates (New Year's Eve). They may be drinking or having a party. We, too, are having a party.

"Every year it's an opportunity to start fresh. It's like a reset, a reboot. It's like, OK, this past year is over. Thank God for it, but it's over and God brought us through it."

The Rev. Roy Newman, pastor of Fresh Visions, said the history of the service is especially rich and rooted in the Black church. With the pandemic, its message is heightened, he added.

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"While we know we've come through a lot, God has continued to bless us and we know there's still a lot for us to come through and to be thankful for," Newman said. "We certainly thought by now that COVID would be a thing of the past, but we're going to continue to be safe and use the necessary safety precautions. We know that God is in control and in his own time, he'll put things back to normal.

"In the meantime, we're going to continue to do what we can to try to encourage people to minister to people and meet people where they are."

Robert Davis, chairperson of the special projects committee for the ALA, said the whole idea of Watch Night is that African Americans were watching and waiting for the first day of freedom to roll in.

"The Emancipation Proclamation opened the door to freedom," Davis said.

The program at First Presbyterian, which has a connection to the Lincoln family, will include a reading of part of Douglass' speech “A Glorious Era Has Begun;” a letter dictated by Sojourner Truth describing her visit with Lincoln thanking him for the Emancipation Proclamation and Harriet Tubman’s response to the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Rev. Susan Phillips, pastor at First Presbyterian, said she became acquainted with Watch Night services when she was living in Georgia. While she said it is a special occasion for the congregation to be hosting the program, Phillips cautioned that like that first Watch Night, people are still gathering and praying and watching for freedom.

"There are lots of ways in which people today do not feel free," Phillips said. "Right now, as I'm watching Omicron (variant) numbers, I think a lot of us are feeling trapped by the pandemic, quite frankly, or trapped in jobs where we're at higher risk or we're working at jobs where the weight of responsibility in trying to respond to the pandemic is beyond exhausting.

"As we look at economic disparities related to race, as we look at other disparities in health and education and all aspects of life, we realize the work of freedom is not done."

Check venues for specific COVID-19 protocols.

Contact Steven Spearie: 217-622-1788, sspearie@sj-r.com, twitter.com/@StevenSpearie.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: A New Year's Eve Celebration in Springfield reminiscent of Watch Night