What does your parish do for the Great Fast?

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What does your parish do for the Great Fast? What do you wish your parish would do?

Do you have the Canon of St. Andrew the first and fifth weeks? Do you have Forgiveness Vespers? Do you have Pre-Sanctified Liturgy? Do you have All Souls Saturday services? What else? I’m curious what the different traditions are and the diversity in how they are used at the parish level.
 
At the Melkite Church I’m currently attending, the Lenten Liturgical schedule is

Saturday evening Vespers
Sunday morning Liturgy
Wednesday evening Presanctified
Friday evening Akathist.
 
No, it is not only a Slavic custom - amongst the Catholics the Melkites and Romanian Greek Catholics also have this tradition.

In most places even though it is a Matins service it is “anticipated” on Wednesday evening rather than Thursday morming. Several versions of the Typikon call for it to begin at the fourth hour of night or about 10 p.m.; this is generally only followed in monasteries and most parishes have it earlier in the evening.

Traditionally the life of St. Mary of Egypt is read during the service; it can be read online at orthodox.net/saints/mary-of-egypt.html

Holy Trinity Monastery (Jordanville) has printed a very nice book containing not only the entire Canon, but the life of St. Mary of Egypt and the subdivisions of the Canon for the first four days of Clean Week. The divisions of the Great Canon for the first week can be found at orthodox.net/greatlent/index.html

Getting back to more general Lenten practices, on Friday evenings as bpbasilphx has pointed out, some Melkite parishes celebrate Small Compline with the Akathist Canon and portions of the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God broken up into four divisions; on Friday of the Fifth Week (the vigil of Akathistos Saturday) the entire Akathist is chanted. This is a Greek tradition and is generally not followed in Ukrainian or Russian parishes.

The Akathist to the Passion of Christ is prayed in some Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox parishes on Friday evenings where either Presanctified is not offered or is offered on Friday morning. The Akathist to the Mother of God is generally only taken once during Great Lent on Akathistos Saturday (or the evening before) in the Ukrainian tradition.
 
My parish is an urban parish with families traveling an hour each way to come to Divine Liturgy.

We do have All-Souls Vespers and reading of the Hromoty and we will have Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesday evening. This is the extent of our services because of the scattering of our parish families.

At one time, we used to have an “Easter Traditiions Saturday” for the kids in the ECF program. They learned to make the things for a Paska basket, made the Artos and then got to learn to make pysanky. They also had pizza too!

Now, they do a Lenten collection to help the Carmelites at Sugar Loaf.

The rest of the parish pitches in with the making of holupky and other foods for our parish Easter Bazaar on St. Lazarus Day. This is a MAJOR fund raiser for our parish.

It’s diffiduclt with so many families living so far away from the church to get people to attend any services other than Divine Liturgy on Sunday. I don’t know what other services people would want to attend…
 
The Old Rite Cathedral in Erie has a rather full schedule:

Monday is open.

Tuesday Morning: Hours. Tuesday Evening: Great Compline

Wed Morning: Hours. Wed Evening: Presanctified.

Thursday–same as Tuesday.

Friday–same as Wed.

Saturday morning: Hours and Liturgy. Saturday evening: Vespers and Matins

Sunday morning: Midnight and Hours, then Liturgy.
 
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