I remember a conversation with an Evangelical who remarked that the Spirit had been leading their church to study the lives of Christians who had lived after the time of the New Testament to see how they had lived out the gospel they had learned from the apostles. They were realizing that one way of seeing how the apostles’ work could be understood better was by seeing how those who heard and followed them lived their lives and thought about things. As long as I did not use the term “cult of the saints” to describe what she was discovering, the conversation went on famously.
Evangelicals, because they are engaged with the reality of who Christ is at a lived and practical level, often wind up rediscovering old Catholic ideas under new names because the old Catholic ideas are *descriptive*, not prescriptive. They are like old maps describing major features of the landscape we call Reality. If you explore Reality, you wind up running across the same mountain ranges and rivers and deserts because they haven’t gone anywhere. And though you might name them something else, you will eventually discover that old explorers long ago found the same things and sync up your map with theirs.
One of the things Christians worked out long ago was the parallel between the harvest of the crops and the harvest of souls for the kingdom of God. Given that Jesus talks about the fields being white for harvest and explicitly draws such parallels in his parables, it didn’t take genius to figure it out.
So it’s not super surprising that, rejecting Halloween as “pagan” Evangelicals would cook up “Harvest Festivals” as what they imagined to be “alternatives” and then add the spiritual dimension of talking about the “harvest of souls” for Jesus, thereby rediscovering the whole point of All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day.
I count that as a win for ecumenism. When brother and sister Christians work out the same basic ideas in slightly different lingo, I say, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity.”
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