Kethuvim

There's been a great deal of debate over the lat couple of weeks pertaining to many "mega-churches" cancelling their Sunday services on Christmas. I think I'll weigh in on the issue with the full knowledge that no one gives a crap what I think anyway. Here goes.

I've done a great deal of thinking about this, and I've tried to look at it from both points of argument and I've come to the conclusion that cancelling Christmas service makes about as much sense as me being employed at a modeling agency. I understand that "mega-churches" require a lot of people to run their average service, I totally understand. My question is then, why can't you scale down your service and just have a sripped-down approach to worship without giant bands, Sunday school, dramas, and all the other superflous bullcrap that goes along with your normal Sunday? Why can't people just show up and worship God together, even if the attendence is 1/3 of what it normally is? My feeling is that, as a church, you worship with whoever decides that Jesus is important enough in their lives to show up to church, and if people want to stay home instead, so be it.

I know that these churches are having multiple services leading up to Christmas day, which is fine. However, somewhere during the last 2000 years of the Church, someone thought that the birth of Jesus was importnat enough to set aside a special day each year to celebrate it. Why wouldn't people want to worship together on this day? Personally, I'm looking forward to being with my brothers and sisters on Christmas day to worship together. I'm looking forward to singing, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" together and all of the other songs pertaining to this special day.

The greatest argument that I've heard from these churches who are cancelling is that Christmas is a family day. I'll certinaly be doing family things on Christmas day as are most people. My question in return is, what better way for a family to spend Christmas together than acknowledging the birth of our Savior? What can be more family oriented than that? The truth of the matter is that this whole argument is just a sympton of a greatly diseased North American Church.

For most American "Christians," Jesus is just something else that you do. So when Jesus gets in the way of our family time, we just cast him aside as another inconvenience to our plans. "I just don't have time for church with our Christmas schedule." "I just can't fit church into today, because we have to go to Aunt Mabel's house, and then go to Grandma and Grandpa Jones' house." The fact is that most people want Jesus in their lives until following him becomes inconvenient. "Give me Jesus, just don't let him get in the way."

I think presents can wait until a little later in the day this Sunday. After all, God's gift of his Son might just trump your new Ipod.