Keeping Watch as the Year Turns

Watch Night is a service kept on the night of 31 December, seeing the old year out and the new year in with prayer rather than revelry. In its Methodist form it descends from John Wesley, who from the 1740s held late-night "watch-night" services, and it is bound up with the Covenant Service, in which believers renew their covenant with God; many Methodist congregations keep a covenant renewal at or near the new year.

The night carries a second, distinct and profound meaning in the African American churches. On the night of 31 December 1862, congregations gathered as "Freedom's Eve", waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to take legal effect at midnight on 1 January 1863, which would declare enslaved people in the rebelling states free. Watch Night in the Black church is kept in memory of that vigil, a service of both religious and historical deliverance, and it remains one of the most significant nights of the year in many congregations. The two strands, Wesleyan covenant and Emancipation memory, now run together in the observance, which has spread well beyond Methodism.