Why do so many Protestant churches choose Easter as the time for a church breakfast?

Providing a breakfast on Easter Sunday seems to be a tradition among many Protestant churches. The question is simple: why on Easter?

Of course, Protestants hardly need a “why” for anything we do. Our freedoms are large. The immediate answer that occurs to me is that those who go to a sunrise service will need to have breakfast before worship and it is most convenient for everyone just to eat together at the church. But most churches do not have sunrise services. (As a child the two services I most dreaded were the watch night service on new year’s eve and the sunrise service). But they do have a breakfast. Of course, this fits the pattern that the one thing we keep as we change our liturgies on a regular basis is eating.

But the “chummy” approach to Easter morning seems strange to me. It is a high point in the church year and liturgical calendar. I have always found that the breakfast approach to Easter morning diminishes the power of the event and gives Easter the picnic feeling. Picnic feelings are ok. I just find that it knocks me a bit off-center when I am gathering energy to give Christ glory of an extraordinary kind. By the time worship begins, too many pancakes, eggs and sausage keep digestive systems working over time and turn the service into a time for the food to settle in, after which Christians rush off to their big family dinner.  Easter has become a huge eating day. Seems counterintuitive to me. It’s just not what I had supposed we would do.

The church I am going to on Easter will have a breakfast and everyone who comes to service gets a free gift. Christ is the good. Christ is the gift. No thank you, I have already eaten. No thank you, I have already been given all.

Consider these words by John Henry Newman:  

“We are now approaching that most sacred day when we commemorate Christ’s passion and death. Let us try to fix our minds upon this great thought. Let us try, what is so very difficult, to put off other thoughts, to clear our minds of things transitory, temporal, and earthly, and to occupy them with the contemplation of the Eternal Priest and His one ever-enduring Sacrifice.”