This year our church will have three main Christmas events, an evening Carol’s by Candlelight, a family Carol service and then a Christmas Eve all age event. We don’t have access to a building for Christmas Day unfortunately.
I thought it might be helpful to share a few thoughts about how we do them and why, particularly the Carols by Candlelight event. It’s worth saying that context is king. My friend Steve Kneale has written on Building Jerusalem before about serving in a Muslim majority context where all of our Christmas and Easter traditions are culturally alien. Here in North Birmingham, we have areas that are like that close by but the area where our church meets, which is about 25 minutes walk from our house intersects three types of community. The first is white, working class with people either living on the council estate or private but still working class residential areas. Then there is a more ethnically diverse area with recent immigrants from a variety of contexts. Finally, there is a long established Afro-Carribean contingent.
When designing the evening carol service, we have thought primarily but not exclusively about the white working class and Afro Caribbean communities. One reason for this is that we are already a very diverse congregation but we are aware that this is where our priority is. So, a big message we want to communicate is that we are here as part of the community and want to serve the community. One way we serve and love the community by being part of it is by celebrating Christmas together. And a big part of celebrating Christmas is by singing carols.
Those carols are very much there in the collective conscience or memory bank. The people may not have been in church for a long time, so they won’t know all of the songs we sing now. Nor will they necessarily know the words to all the carols but somewhere in that collective conscience are those memories of carol singers turning up at the door, a brass band in the shopping centre, a carol concert at school, maybe even going to an actual carol service or perhaps dropping in on midnight mass, Christmas Eve after a few bevvies. That’s what we are seeking to tap into.
It is worth making two further observations. First is that we are new to doing this here in Kingstanding as a youngish church plant without a building. It was easy to get a crowd at our old church in Bearwood, we had a building, over 100 years of history and a reputation going back over a decade of a carol service with choir organised by an elder who also happened to have a national reputation as a musical director and composer. You don’t always have that kind of luxury!
So, two years into doing this here, we have made sure that we set expectations at the right level. We are not expecting queues at the door, primarily we expect people to come who have been invited. We think it will take a few more years of getting known as part of the community and known for putting on a carol service before people start turning up and that’s okay. Because in the meantime, delivering a few thousand flyers to homes and giving them out in the streets is another way of being visible in our community. And it’s not a bad thing to be known as people who will put on a carol service for the community, even if the community isn’t quite ready to come through the door yet.
The other thing is that the Carol service will be nothing like one of our Sunday services. That’s not the problem we can worry about either. Of course it will be different, we don’t sing that style of song with those instruments normally, nor do we use Candlelight and nor do any of us elders stop preaching after 10 minutes (again the style if an evangelistic talk will be different to a normal exposition).
So we have to be clear about what we are trying to do. We are not trying to give a flavour on this occasion of normal church. There will be other times for that and ways to do it. Rather, we are building up a relationship with our community for the long term to give us opportunities to share the good news.
I thought it might be helpful to share something of our approach here to help you think a little more about your context. How we do things here won’t work in every context. Please let us know in the comments below how you do Christmas where you are.
Faithroots 