Two types of people
The world can be divided into two types of people: The planners and the deadliners. The planners get straight to the most important task, they stay calm, they work out the process and they pull together the team to get it done. The deadliners ignore the task until a few hours before the deadline and then go slightly mad trying to pull it together (alone) at the last moment. I am the latter. Many of those in children’s and families’ ministry seem to be the former. When we asked them when they wanted us to release our Christmas resources we were told it needed to be July or August. That means we were writing about angels, shepherds and presents under the tree in May(!) and have already launched our Lego-themed Christmas resources.
I am thankful that many family ministry teams want to get down to it in September. They want to get their fellow heroes around their kitchen table to dream, to plan and to pray about how their church will reach local families at Christmas. They don’t just want some candles and a carefully printed order of service. They want bales of straw. They want banners and live donkeys. They want adverts all around the village. They want to talk about it at the school gate. They want to enthuse the children. They want to rehearse the drama. They want a spectacle. They want to create memories. Because they want the next generation to stand wide eyed beside the manger to meet their saviour. We all want that.
Get ahead for Christmas
If you are a church leader then please invite the planners into the room this September. Don’t be the daft deadliner staying up the night before the all age service making a giant cracker out of last week’s Amazon box. Don’t be left doing it all alone. Instead you can learn from the planners. If you are one, all the better! Gather your Christmas team around your kitchen table. Fix the dates for the big services. Understand how they will be different and who needs to be involved in planning each one. Have an eye to January, wondering how to hold out Christ for when the decorations have come down. It’s alright to say that you don’t have ‘a Christmas team’. You do have Christmas. You do have Good News for all people. The Lord has done the hardest part. You also don’t need to have a live donkey. Our free downloadable resources are available on our website so perhaps some of the hard work has been done for you already. (And our super simple Lego-themed advent family devotions are on the way).
Awe and wonder
Churches still report that they are at their most full for Christmas. Families come to us for the awe and the wonder. They want to sing, “O come let us adore him. Christ the Lord.” We are offering them their eternal King, even if they think they’re coming for an orange with a candle stuck in it. And personally, I am slowly learning that planners aren’t just for Christmas.
Ed Drew is the Ministry Director of Faith in Kids (www.faithinkids.org) which exists to see confident parents and thriving churches raising children together to trust Jesus eternally.
A longer version of this article appeared in the September 2024 issue of Evangelicals Now.
