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Re: [WORSHIP] Christmas Ideas for Small Churches
> From tsbarber@juno.com Fri Jul 25 13:10:25 1997
> >Kelly Dodge responded:
> > After being involved in over a dozen of these things, I took
> > last Christmas and Easter off.
> Being from the wild-eyed radical fringe, our fellowship took it one step
> further and eliminated Christmas altogether as a church event. No muss,
> no fuss, problem solved!
...snip!...
What a cool concept! Get rid of Christmas! You know we should beat the
world to this one! Right now Christmas is one of the worst eye sores to
those of broken family backgrounds. More and more people get sick of it.
Eventually there will be a big backlash against everything to do with
Christmas. And guess what will become the scapegoat for blame... yeah you
guessed correctly - the Church! People will through out the church (baby)
as part of the same movement to throughout the commercialism (bathwater).
What we need is for the church to disassociate itself from Christmas as
merely a season. We should emphasize a true Christmas spirit all year
around. On the other hand, we should never ban it completely or boycot
it the way the JWs do otherwise we can come under attack as being
legalistic... but instead use the Christmas season as a time
of year for increased works of giving and helping those in need. We
need to BE DIFFERENT THAN THE WORLD around the season of Christmas.
With this approach we may even have half a chance of getting people from
main line denominations and the so called social gospel churches coming
online too. Wow! The whole church working together. What a concept!
The key is to visibly disassociate the church from the hype around
Christmas so that when the backlash occurs, no one can blame the Church
or Christians for ruining it.
How's that for a wild-eyed radical idea?
Then perhaps we will be able to worship in December instead of shutting it
all down for a month to sing traditional Christmas hymns for the sake of
seasonal nostalgia.
Regards,
Darcy L. Watkins
dwatkins@rogers.wave.ca
P.S.
Tim,
I'll probably be poking into those worship course notes you sent me
starting a week or two once I sort out stuff from a GS Developers seminar
I'm going to next week. Due to your open display of wild-eye radicalism,
I'll have to bump up the priority a notch. ;-) Once it's done the'll
be available to all at my web site.