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Do you want to put on a Christmas program for the holiday season, but struggle to find a program that fits your congregation size, your style, your talent pool, and your schedule? Most productions out there require several rehearsals and specific set designs. Quite frankly, many of us just don’t have the volunteer power to do this.

Narratives are easy. They give your small church a way to highlight children and youth during Christmastime without lots of practices, expensive costumes, or complicated stage designs. As long as you have children, youth, or adults who are willing to read, you can do this.

Kendra Shares Her Gift For Creative Writing

Kendra Lynn, understands what this is all about. Kendra was brought up in a small church, where her Dad was a church planter. She learned early in her life how small churches need to be creative, especially when it comes to the holidays.

Kendra discovered she loved to write first-person narratives, especially about Christmas. The story of the birth of Christ impacted her at a young age, and she loved to share it with others. Kendra’s family loved her writings, and soon, they started to use them as the narrative for their Christmas cards, and the rest, shall we say, is history. Kendra has been writing and sharing the love of Christ ever since!

Kendra and her husband are church planters in Michigan, and she continues to use that gift for writing in their small church. In this blog post and free PDF, Kendra shares three small church Christmas narratives.

Shine Jesus In Your Christmas Programs

These two programs use multiple readers. They both brightly shine the light of Christmas on Jesus and share the true message of the gospel. Kendra’s small church always makes sure their focus looks outward at Christmas, and her short programs certainly accomplish that goal.

Narratives Work Great With Mixed Ages

These narration programs are adaptable to your small church needs. You can mix young people with teens and older adults as readers. This is a great way to promote intergenerational ministry and a good example to your community about how small church family life works. 

These Christmas narrations can work well with a simple podium and readers coming up to the microphone. But you can also easily build on that if you want to add other dimensions of creativity. There are suggestions throughout the programs, but we challenge you to put a creative committee together and see what they might come up with!

Staging Options For Your Small Church Narrative

There are lots of possibilities with these Christmas narrations on how to ‘stage’ them. 

  • Have your readers dressed in Biblical costumes and come to the front stage to read.
  • Ask readers to stand at a podium to the side of the stage on the floor while you project a slide on the screen. The slides can be scripture slides or images downloaded.
  • Stand readers off stage with a microphone. Then set up a curtain screen to do silhouette characters behind the curtain, with light shining from the back.

**Songs can be sung by the Worship Team alone, performed by a soloist as a special number, or sung as a congregational song. It’s always a great idea to show lyrics when the congregation is singing, this helps those who aren’t very familiar with a song.

Try a New Narrative This Christmas!

Think about the different possibilities this Christmas. 

Christmas narrations can work for small churches.

  • No expensive props needed
  • Can work with few numbers
  • Perfect for all ages
  • Easily uses mixed ages
  • Don’t require lots of practices

Five Tips To Give Reader Success

  1. Give your reader plenty of time to read through their part ahead of time. Don’t just throw it at them and expect them to perform their part without reading it first.
  2. For children, when you give them their part to read, have them read it to you. This allows you the opportunity to help them say words correctly or define words they don’t know.
  3. Sometimes it helps to give the reader a little character insight based on background information. For example, for a reader whose part includes seeing an angel, before they read their part, ask about how they might feel if a real angel appeared to them right now and started talking with them. 
  4. Use BIG print when printing out reading parts. Readers deal with lots of things during a performance, such as lights, knowing where to stand, anxiety, seeing/ not seeing the audience, and even a warmer temperature standing in the spotlight. Set them up for success by giving them parts that are typed with larger print on their papers. Then, it will be one less challenge they have to navigate.
  5. If children want someone to be with them, by all means, let it be. Encourage them to bring a buddy, parent, or teacher to stand with them and be willing to jump in and help if necessary.

So, however your small church decides to share the message of Christ this year, we pray you might be able to use some of the resources made available here. Please let us know if you do, post about it in our Facebook community, and don’t forget the pictures! 

Read More:

6 Monologues For The Christmas Season

Easy Children’s Christmas Program: The Proclamations

The Great Christmas Program Disaster