Although many students at Grand Valley State University celebrated Easter on Sunday, the Lenten season isn’t over for everyone. GVSU’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship group follows a different religious calendar and will celebrate Easter holidays this upcoming Sunday.

“We follow a different method for calculating Easter,” said Father Steve VanBronkhorst, one of the spiritual advisors for the group. “It’s a complicated design in figuring it all out.”

The Orthodox Church refers to Easter as Pascha, which is the Old Testament word for Passover, VanBronkhorst said. Their Pascha is not always one week after “Western Easter,” which includes the Catholic and Protestant churches.

“It is calculated every year according to a set of rules,” said Christina Stavros, an advisor for the group. “It’s often different than Western Easter, though.”

The OCF group has between seven and 14 student members, but doesn’t have a lot of interaction with other Christian groups on campus such as Intervarsity and Cru, Stavros said. OCF did work with the other organizations earlier in the year to put on an interfaith panel discussion, where religious leaders from different denominations came and had a discussion about the differences in beliefs and faiths.

VanBronkhorst said the closest Orthodox Church for students to worship at is in Grand Rapids, in which there are Greek, Russian, Antiochian and Romanian Orthodox churches. During Holy Week, the week before Pascha, Orthodox churches have services everyday. This includes having matins services, traditionally done in the morning, at night. “Traditionally, the day starts with the setting of the sun the night before, so we celebrate the matins service in the evening,” VanBronkhorst said.

OCF meets every Tuesday, and plans to attend a Greek Orthodox Church downtown, called Holy Trinity, as a group during Holy Week. Some services that are held during Lent can last for a long time, with participants sometimes standing for three to four hours in one service.

“It takes endurance, but you find you can do more and you are growing closer to Christ,” Stavros said.

The Orthodox Christian Church encourages its members to become vegan, eat less and pray more for the duration of the Lenten season, he added. The money that is not spent on food is then supposed to be given to the poor.

“When we fast, much of the point is social justice,” Stavros said. “What we’re not taking into our bodies, we should be giving to the poor.”

Stavros emphasized that the point of carrying out these practices is not to do them during Lent and then go back to old habits, but to change for the long run.

Students involved in the OCF group learn more about the Orthodox Church traditions and beliefs when they get together as a group every week.

For more information about the organization, visit the OCF page at www.gvsu.edu/studentlife/stuey.

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