What Does The Media Know?

There was quite a bit of coverage in the media over the past two weeks about how churches were programming for Christmas and New Year. Never slow to try to put down Christians or their churches, they attempted to make an issue of the fact that so many of us have opted to have services on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and not on Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Hypocrites! Most of them really couldn't care if every church in the country was closed 365 days a year and 366 in leap years. In fact some would be positively jubilant.

Here's why we planned our schedule this way - and we made our decision on January 4th of this year while Christmas and New Years were still fresh in our minds ...

1. We felt it would be better to go for one major event on Christmas Eve and one on New Year's Eve than spread the congregation out over the Eve and the day of those two holidays. One major service is better than two small ones!

2. Since it's not about us, we felt that Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve would present outstanding opportunities to draw in the unchurched, who would probably not come on Christmas morning or New Year's Day.

3. Many of our church members do not enjoy the luxury of arriving just as service starts and leaving immediately once it is over - they are there far earlier and stay much later. We did not feel it was right to ask dozens of workers who make our services happen to be away from their families from 6.30am on Christmas Day or on New Year's Day. We gave them a holiday!

4. It is important for the church to be culturally relevant. In our culture people spend Christmas Day with their families and New Year's Day sleeping. So we figured we needed to get real and evaluate what would be the best time to draw the maximum amount of people to worship. We were right on for Christmas Eve and feel we will be for New Year's Eve too.

Thankfully we have come to see it is not all about what day we worship or at what time, it is about the fact that we value corporate worship and do all we can to participate in it.

Let the media say what it will - and they will - but this Christmas and New Year we will have shared God's love with far more people than we would have with regular timed services! And I think God is okay with that even if MSNBC isn't!