Festal, Great Vespers

[Priolo Gargallo]

Hello, I'm curious as to how long great festal vespers for the evening before palm sunday at a typical OCA parish may be? Thanks in advance,
Priolo 

[podkarpatska]

Hello, I'm curious as to how long great festal vespers for the evening before palm sunday at a typical OCA parish may be? Thanks in advance,
Priolo  

I don't know. In ACROD about an hour or so.

However, I am curious and this is as good a place to ask - not of the OP but of all of you. In your personal parish experience, what sort of crowd do you have at such Vespers - not Holy Week or even the Nativity - but in general? A percentage of your congregation and the Diocese of you parish would be helpful.

Sadly, we have a handful and as far as I can recall, that has been the case. Our Liturgy will be packed on Palm Sunday as will most of the main Holy Week services, but not Vespers on a Saturday night - even for a big feast like Flowery Sunday ( квітковий неділю, Kvetnatá Nedeľu )as we Slavs called it.

[Schultz]

Hello, I'm curious as to how long great festal vespers for the evening before palm sunday at a typical OCA parish may be? Thanks in advance,
Priolo  

I don't know. In ACROD about an hour or so.

However, I am curious and this is as good a place to ask - not of the OP but of all of you. In your personal parish experience, what sort of crowd do you have at such Vespers - not Holy Week or even the Nativity - but in general? A percentage of your congregation and the Diocese of you parish would be helpful.

Sadly, we have a handful and as far as I can recall, that has been the case. Our Liturgy will be packed on Palm Sunday as will most of the main Holy Week services, but not Vespers on a Saturday night - even for a big feast like Flowery Sunday ( квітковий неділю, Kvetnatá Nedeľu )as we Slavs called it.

At my OCA parish, IIRC, it's about an hour.

As for attendance at "regular" Vespers, it's usually about five or six, although at times it's been just me and the priest and sometimes swelled to about a dozen.  Sadly, in the past year we lost three regular attendees when they moved away, which was extra sad for me because they were my age (generally speaking..I'm a bit older but am young at heart) and we all shared similar interests.

[arimethea]

Hello, I'm curious as to how long great festal vespers for the evening before palm sunday at a typical OCA parish may be? Thanks in advance,
Priolo  

If it is just Vespers then 45 to 60 minutes, depending on the pace of the music.  Most OCA parishes do a Vigil style service which would run about 2 to 2.5 hours.

However, I am curious and this is as good a place to ask - not of the OP but of all of you. In your personal parish experience, what sort of crowd do you have at such Vespers - not Holy Week or even the Nativity - but in general? A percentage of your congregation and the Diocese of you parish would be helpful.

On a typical Saturday night we get about 20-25 from a parish of 800 where on Sundays we average around 500. For major feast Great Vespers will be anywhere from 25-200. Last Palm Sunday I think we had around 100.

[Benjamin the Red]

My parish serves Vigil on Saturday nights, and will serve Vigil for Palm Sunday tomorrow. For a regular Lord's Day Vigil, we'll have 20-30 folks, and around 100 for Liturgy that Sunday. I expect it to be about the same for the Palm Sunday cycle.

For Great Feasts that fall during the week, the Vigil will usually have something like 10 folks, maybe, and the Liturgy may get up to around 20 or so. Also, if it's just Great Vespers and not a full Vigil, it should be about 45 minutes. Maybe more like an hour if there's a Litia.

OCA - Diocese of the South.

[Dominika]

My parish, as probably the vast majority slaviam churches, serves the Vigil every Saturday. The lenth of it differs every time (from one hour ten minutes to 2 hours). There are more or less 15-20 people (including the choir), which is very few; in the Great Lent the attendance was much higher. For the Palm Sunday we have also the Vigil, which lasts about 2-2.5 hours and as I can notice from the last years there come really many people (the church is full), similary as for the usual Sunday Liturgy (we have 2 Liturgies on Sundays).

[Tags:]

OrthodoxChristianity.net > Moderated Forums > Liturgy (Moderator: arimethea) > Topic: Festal, Great Vespers