041: What’s A Blue Christmas Service? (& Why We Might Need It More This Year Than Ever) | Worship & Tech Series Part 7

Episode 041: What’s A Blue Christmas Service? (& Why We Might Need It More This Year Than Ever) | Worship & Tech Series Part 7

Laurie Graham 0:01
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry Podcast.

Laurie Graham 0:14
Hey, welcome back for Episode 41, as we continue with our Worship and Tech Series for small churches. We’ve been spending quite a bit of time on tech so far, so for those of you who need to come up for air, today, we’re back to worship, and we’re going to be talking about one of my all-time favorite holidays. Although there are parts of this season, where what I love about it might not be really the typical, because some of what I love about Christmas is the real raw sadness and the need for hope that tends to pop up as we move toward Christmas. So, today’s episode is all about the Blue Christmas Service, what it is, and why we might need it more this year than ever, but before I jump into the Blue Christmas Service, just a quick word about Christmas and the church. And whether you celebrate the Christmas holiday with Christmas trees, or maybe you stand against the holiday as a pagan tradition in origin that got morphed and adopted by the church. 

Regardless of where you’re at on that issue, I think we can all agree that it’s pretty great to celebrate the birth of Christ! There are so many things in Christian history that were about remembrance. It’s all through the Bible. Remember the days of old, tell stories, building altars of stone, a significant reminders of God working in our lives so we can look back, amazing events when God spoke or intervened. We’re to remember the Lord’s Supper. Our faith is based on remembering, even remembering the Passover, remembering the law, the Promise, meditating on God’s word, and all of these things are part of the same love story of a God who created us, a God who pursues us, a God who never leaves us alone in the joy, in the struggle, in pain, in laughter, a God who is all about redeeming us and guiding us!

We are on this path of eternity together, and nothing stands alone or independent, not even our own lives. Our lives, themselves, are intermingled with the lives of other people that we know, in our community. One thing that happens, oftentimes, during the Christmas season, and it almost seems like it does stand alone because as soon as that holiday season starts peeking through, it’s all happy songs, and the joy berries, and focusing on the light of Christ who came to seek and save the lost, the baby in the manger, the Star of Bethlehem. We love singing Joy to the World in the church and eating cookies and decorating our homes and even our churches with shiny, sparkling things. 

Laurie Graham 2:59
Now, this isn’t all bad, of course, but I don’t think celebrating the birth of Christ was ever supposed to be a separate thing. Like, it’s time to move on, no more sadness, we’re just going to turn to happy. Do you know what I mean by that? I know I’m not alone here, because I talked to person after person who literally dread the Christmas season and I’m talking about Christians who know Jesus, where holiday songs are a punch in the gut, reminding them of loss and pain. And yet, in the midst of all this, few people, and even fewer churches, really create space for difficult emotions that pop up during this not always so most wonderful time of the year. I have some friends who even truly believe that we should not make space for sadness during Christmas. They actually have said to me, “Christmas is a time for happiness” and honestly, really, that’s a code for denial, because none of us live in a 100% happy world all the time, but for some, Christmas really is about shoving all the sadness away and just embracing the joy. It’s almost a season of denial. 

But here’s the thing, God did not create us this way. He did not create us to shove all of our emotions away, to live hidden, or to be the one person that some way in the crowd and another person in the quiet of your own house. Study after study, whether it’s in spiritual and religion areas or medical or psychology, study after study are showing us time and time again, that acknowledging and processing emotions actually leads to better health and wholeness, deeper, healthier relationships, deeper connection with Jesus, longer life, literally physically longer and healthier life, and even more fulfillment. In fact, you will find no biblical mandate to deny your sadness or anyone else’s, and to be joyful all the time. That is, not if you take the Bible in context, because God has never been about denying sadness. He gave us an incredible range of emotions and none of these emotions are off limits. In fact, they make us very, very human, the way He created us, and they actually have the capacity to draw us closer to God and to each other, if we go there, if we acknowledge them, identify them, process them, and share them in safe places. 

Now, if we decide to deny our emotions, or hide them, or shove them under a rug, we are living half a life, in my opinion, and in my experience, because we will never experience the fullness of God and the fullness of joy and the fullness of abundance in Him without acknowledging the difficult stuff! Like, consider this, if we never had rain or clouds, we really wouldn’t enjoy the fullness of the sunshine. If we didn’t experience stress, we would never have a full experience of peace. If we didn’t have pain, we wouldn’t even know the difference of what it is to feel relief, or to be in better health, and I believe God gives us all this in humanity, honestly, to make us long for heaven. If everything on this planet were perfect, or if we could fix all things and make them happy, why would we need heaven, the place of no sadness, or no more pain, or no more fighting, or no more wars? We honestly wouldn’t have need for Jesus. 

Laurie Graham 6:42
So, I’d love to propose that we leave the fulfillment of abundance and joy up where it belongs, and that we actually acknowledge the gifts of all the emotions we get to experience on this planet. Because in a way, there is a gift in the midst of pain, because it does make us long for heaven. There is a gift in the midst of sadness that drives me to the heart of God in a way that joy does not. There is some bits of gift in loss. Not that there isn’t much to miss, but the gift in the midst of it all, is that gift that drives us to long for heaven, and for more of Jesus. So, as we head into the holidays, I’d love to give you just a few thoughts that might make a really big impact in your church this year, and into people in your community as well, some thoughts that actually might draw some people to come to church that usually avoid it during these times, and then I want to share with you specifically about a Blue Christmas Service, what it is and how you can implement one in your church maybe even this year, to reach some people in a different, beautiful, heartfelt way, to meet people, other humans in their loss as well as our own, to offer the hope of heaven in a gentle, compassionate, softer way, to help move hurting hearts toward Jesus. 

Now, because I know you might or might not have the desire or even the authority in your church, to actually host a separate Blue Christmas service. I just want to start with a few thoughts about making room for both sadness and joy in your small church this year in the holiday season. So please hear me, this is not about obliterating the joy, because I really do love Christmas. It’s not about being doom and gloom. It’s just about making a little bit of space, acknowledging the needs of so many people. If you start implementing these small things, it really does make a difference in helping people feel loved, included, and honestly feeling very seen in a really new way, and the first one is simply this. Get in a habit or build a culture of just acknowledging loneliness, grief and loss during worship service or at events.

Just even a simple statement can make a huge impact! It really just takes some intentional awareness to recognize how often we alienate people and deepen their hearts as we head into Christmas and honestly, even other times of the year, when we can simply change our verbiage, or teach our leaders and teachers just to be a little more sensitive, that there are hurting people in our midst all the time. Instead of saying hey, we know everybody’s excited for Thanksgiving, or we know you all want to get to the presence under your tree, to keep in mind that there are people who are going home alone in the holidays and not on purpose, not because that’s what they want. 

Laurie Graham 10:01
There are people in your midst who are estranged from people that they love. There are people with no money for presents, with no tree. There are people on the verge of divorce, people struggling with infertility, people who have not yet shared a diagnosis they have received, and if we keep these things in mind, then instead of saying we know everybody’s excited for Christmas, maybe we’ll say whether you are going home to a full house today, or you’re going home alone, keep in mind, right, and then we can talk about the hope of Jesus. It just changes little things, but makes a very big difference, and helps people who are feeling very alone and isolated and misunderstood. It lets them know that you see them, even if they have not shared their hurts. 

The other thing I just want to mention is to teach the full story of Christmas, not just the baby in the manger. The story of Christmas really didn’t begin with the baby in the manger, it begins with creation, and it also doesn’t end with the child in the manger. Christmas is not a standalone event in God’s story. This is actually one of the reasons I love Christmas and I love celebrating Advent leading up to Christmas, and no Advent is not just for Catholics or liturgical churches. It’s really just acknowledging a season of waiting that happened in biblical history and also happens now! It’s all about anticipating Christ’s coming. Whether it’s His coming to Earth that happened thousands of years ago, or His Second Coming.

Celebrating Advent adds so much depth and opportunity for teaching about the context of Christ coming. It acknowledges the darkness that needs the light of a Savior. Do you see the difference? The Christmas story is about hope, yes, but it’s hope for the hopeless. It’s about light in the darkness. It’s about trust for those who are scared. It’s about acceptance for the unloved, redemption for the discarded, guidance for the lost! So if we just jump, like, about face into Joy to the World, and we don’t acknowledge what leads to that, the depth of sadness in O Come O Come Emmanuel, then we’re actually missing a big piece of the story. 

So, there are some really easy, very impactful things you can do in your church for greater impact, like setting up a holiday prayer tree, or even a wailing wall, or creating a memory wall, pairing up families with those who are alone, doing some really beautiful service projects. You can find some of these great ideas in a post on the website, we’re gonna link it in the show notes. The article starts off with 12 Ideas to Reach the Hurting, and really talks about the holiday season. So, if you’re looking for some more easy, impactful things to do, definitely check out that post on the website on smallchurchministry.com, but I want to focus now on holding a Blue Christmas Service because it is one of the things that can really impact your Christmas culture almost in your small church. Last year at Small Church Ministry, we actually put together a whole Blue Christmas Pack. We had so many testimonies come in about it of people who utilized what was in there and the resources. This year, we’ve had more people reaching out, which is really why I decided to do this podcast episode! People have been saying what is a Blue Christmas Service? Tell me more! 

Laurie Graham 13:43
So here we go. We’re going to talk about what it is, how impactful it can be, and also how you could host one relatively easy this year, with not a whole lot of prep. If a Blue Christmas service is totally new for you, like a brand new concept it was for me too, about five years ago is when I heard about it, and you’re gonna get a great picture of the kind of impact it can have. Now, if you’ve hosted Blue Christmas Services in the past or you’ve attended them, I’m going to be sharing some great elements and different tips that I’ve used, just to make it even more beautiful and impactful and more engaging as well. Because the blue, the Blue Christmas Service can be a really beautiful way just to make some space during the Advent season leading up to Christmas, some space for anybody suffering any kind of loss, whether it’s the loss of a person. Whether it’s depression, or the loss of some dreams, or finances, or stability, or health, we’ve all got different kinds of loss, and that’s really what a Blue Christmas Service was designed to address. 

Okay, so let’s just start with the biggest question, which is what is a Blue Christmas Service? So, a Blue Christmas Service, basically, is a quiet, little more contemplative or reflective service that often happens on the evening of December 21, which is the winter solstice. Now, it doesn’t happen on that day, but that is where the service was kind of born out of. In some churches, the Blue Christmas Service is called the Service of the Longest Night. So if you ever see that around the holidays, the Service of the Longest Night, that’s the same as a Blue Christmas Service. Now, the reason it’s often held on winter solstice, which is December 21, is because the winter solstice has the longest night and the shortest day in the entire year. So it’s sometimes held on this day because it’s symbolic of our darker nights or our saddest nights, times when we find ourselves grieving or lonely or longing for something better, because the day after winter solstice, the night gets shorter and the light gets longer. Isn’t that just beautiful in it’s symbolism? I just love it!

The Blue Christmas Service, as I mentioned, is just about making some space during a season that is typically very noisy with celebration. It acknowledges the both, and of our emotions, like our sadness and our joy, that often happened within the same space and the same day. It’s really an avenue of some beautiful pastoral care, and compassionate community for people who might be struggling with many different things. Now, I held my first Blue Christmas Service as a worship leader in 2017. If you look into its origin, it’s a bit unclear and a little bit fuzzy. Although it possibly originated among hospice centers up in Canada, it actually became more popular in the United Methodist Church denomination, as well as some Catholic congregations, and they had their own version of a Blue Christmas Mass.

Laurie Graham 16:57
Now today, you’ll find it more and more in Evangelical churches and non-denominational settings. People are hosting them even in communities and finding just so much Jesus there, hope and healing, and just a lot of beauty! Now, if the name Blue Christmas is reminding you of the old Elvis song, it has nothing to do with Elvis, okay. Although it absolutely can include some sentiments of missing somebody or something, again, that human emotion of loss, as well as longing. A Blue Christmas Service basically offers like a set apart service that allows for, so it doesn’t conjure it up, but it allows for feelings of sadness that already exists, or feeling of loneliness or lost during the holidays. But I also want to say, it’s not just about the sad emotions, it’s very much about hope, at least the way I’ve done it, it all leads to hope! 

Now, as I mentioned earlier, everybody is not necessarily a fan of making space for sadness in the holidays. I have a friend who cannot stand the Blue Christmas Service concept. He actually declares that nobody should be sad around the holidays, this is a belief his entire family has, and that by offering a Blue Christmas service, we are giving people a reason to dwell on sadness. Now, I have to be honest, I could not disagree more with that. We already have a mix of sadness and loss and grief, or depression or confusion or fear. Every human does. Nobody dwells 100% on the happy/ joy side of things. For those who have suffered loss of any kind, I’m saying financial, the loss of, like, having a different future, like with divorce.

Yes, death as well, but there’s so many more areas. The happy holidays actually accentuate the feelings of sadness. Being surrounded by happy Christmas carols and holiday parties often cause people either to mask their feelings, and even sometimes create shame around having these feelings. It also causes a lot of people to go into hiding. They, they don’t come out as much, because they want to avoid it. When a loved one isn’t present any longer, like in this circumstance, when we’re celebrating holidays which so much happiness, there’s often some guilt with it, as well as loneliness. 

And as I mentioned, all the different scientific and health studies that have happened over the past couple of decades, which I truly just believe is catching up to the Bible, but all these studies that are saying when we don’t make space for emotions that we consider negative, when we shove them down, when we deny them, we are literally causing ourselves illness, physically, emotionally, socially and so much more. We’re causing relational disconnection. We’re causing spiritual distance because God made us human for a reason, and part of humaneness is having emotions, and a pretty broad range of them! If you ever have done a little study, or if you want to on whether it’s biblical to offer space for sadness, you’re not going to come up short in the Bible.

Laurie Graham 20:22
Lamenting was a regular part of the patterns of God’s people. The book of Psalms is full of crying out and acknowledging these deeper, harder emotions, so many more places throughout not just the Old Testament, but the New Testament. And here’s the thing, when we are crying out, when we are lamenting, we are crying out because we want to encounter God as He meets us in our sadness, in our grief, and in our loss. If there’s no crying out or no acknowledgement, there really is no opportunity for healing, for God to come into that space, it just becomes something that stays hidden under a cloak, tucked away. 

Now remember, it’s not eliminated. When we hide our negative emotions, it’s still all there, it’s just stalking and lurking and damaging us in the darkness. It’s hurting us physically and mentally and emotionally and spiritually. It’s almost like if you had a nasty infection and you decided not to heal it, but you just decided to just shove it under and cover it up, and it’s literally just there festering, and really working to destroy us. So, recognizing pain and loss and loneliness doesn’t need to lead to more pain and loss and loneliness. The desire, the hope, the goal is to recognize our pain, loss, loneliness, or grief, or whatever, and allow that to lead us deeper and closer to the heart of Jesus and our need for a Savior. It reminds us that although the world might be dark and difficult and lonely, that there is a promise coming, and that promise culminates in the birth of this baby of Jesus coming to Earth! Recognizing our loss and making space for grieving does not minimize the promise, it actually accentuates it. 

So, here’s what a Blue Christmas Service looks like, and I’m going to walk you through some typical elements and where and how to even develop a service if that seems like something you want to explore. As I mentioned, the Blue Christmas Service often happens on December 21, but it doesn’t need to. Just think of it as a more reflective, quiet evening that leads to hope. For us, it was about an hour long, and it was followed by a really sweet soup supper. The Blue Christmas Service typically has elements of quiet reflection, often accompanied by scripture, responsive readings, and some liturgical elements. Now in case the word liturgical just sent you outside your normal church lingo, I want to tell you, there’s nothing mystical about the word liturgical.

It’s a word that’s been used in a lot of different settings, and the word liturgical, it literally means the work of the people. So, at the core, the word liturgy is just about the desire to involve worshipers in the elements of the service. So, instead of one person reading a scripture, being called up front to a microphone, the people read it together. Instead of one person doing something and everyone else watching them or listening to them as they pray, the people pray together! This is really the core of most liturgical elements. It’s just about people singing, or responding, or praying together, and that’s why it’s written out, so we can be in unity in that. 

Laurie Graham 23:48
Other people think of liturgy as just being an order of worship, and oftentimes it is, it’s just an order of worship. It doesn’t have to be not Evangelical, and I just want to get rid of some of these misplaced images, because liturgy can be used beautifully in very Evangelical Jesus-loving communities. Now, I love Jesus. I’ve been involved in contemporary settings for decades, and I also love many, many liturgical elements, and in the Blue Christmas service, wow! It is just a beautiful place to connect and find meaning in them as well. So, when I talk about all the liturgical elements in the Blue Christmas Service, I promise you, it’s all about Jesus and hope, and God’s incredible love. Liturgy is simply this defined order that leads worshipers through different elements of reading and praying and reflecting together. At least, that’s how I’m using the word. So a Blue Christmas service is a softer type of service with invitations to participate, but please hear me, there’s no directives. Nobody has to sit, stand, or light a candle, or pray, but there are a lot of invitations. It’s not in place of your Christmas Eve Service, please hear that. A Blue Christmas Service is an add-on. It’s an addition to what happens during your Christmas season, and it’s also not for everyone! The Blue Christmas Service will not or probably should not even attract everyone in your church. It has a specific purpose and it’s for a specific people. 

So, if you’re wondering about hosting one, here’s what I learned. When I started looking at hosting a Blue Christmas Service, because I just heard about this online, I was really intrigued. I thought about the possibility of connecting loss and hope together during the Christmas time. At the time, when I started looking at it, I had been through some loss. In fact, my church had. We had a few friends who were dreading the Christmas season that year, and I really started exploring how we could bridge this huge gap between celebrating Jesus, even when, maybe, we weren’t feeling all that joyous or full of Glee. I hosted our first one as a worship leader in 2017, and I have to be honest, I found lots of little bits and pieces about the Blue Christmas Service, but I did not find one full service order that really fit us as a community. So I had to, I don’t know, just twist it and change it and add some things and take some things out, but I really fell in love with the concept. Some full services that I found swere just way too traditional than the culture of my church, which are a little more casual. Some of the language in the readings we just wouldn’t relate to, so I didn’t necessarily find a full service that I could just plug and play in our setting. 

Laurie Graham 26:32
So as I said, I took bits and pieces and I added some contemporary songs that were simple, and I found an incredible video by Dan Stevers that totally made me cry, but left me with so much hope. We added some video clips and things that married the sadness and the hope and the beauty that Jesus offers, and again, a few contemporary songs that we could lead simply, very simply on an acoustic guitar or a piano. But by the next year, when we hosted our second one, I had written an entire Done for You Blue Christmas Service that worked so beautifully for us, from the call of worship to a closing blessing, and it included a beautiful Five Candles of Remembrance, like a piece of liturgy. Now a word about candles, I love candles. Candles to me are, I don’t know, they just helped me focus, they helped me reflect. They really, often bring me to Jesus, there’s a symbol of it. So candles actually are a big part of this service. They often are included a lot in the Blue Christmas Service as well. And so as I walk through the pieces, you’ll kind of hear that. 

Now, you can totally do the same thing that I did and search online. Just Google Blue Christmas Service or The Service of the Longest Night, and you will find some really beautiful pieces out there to incorporate things that fit you well. You can tweak it, you can write your own, you can grab the pieces I put together here. Whatever works for you, just remember there is no one right way to do a Blue Christmas Service. It’s really about the purpose of it, which is creating a space again, just to acknowledge some sadness and loss and grief, sometimes shame in the middle of this holiday that is so different. But in our service, we had lots of Scripture readings, one from Psalm 139, and Isaiah 9, and a reading from Ecclesiastes and some Psalms. We added a few easy, not to dated contemporary worship songs that really fit the theme.

The candle, the Five Candles of Remembrance piece that I wrote actually goes through O Come, O Come Emmanuel. So there’s, there’s this reflective piece about remembering, whether it’s family or friends that we lost, or the second candle, remembering the stuff of life we have lost, whether it’s tangible or intangible, like our jobs or our health. The third candle talks about just remembering ourselves and the person that we wanted to become, the person we are now, and even the shortcomings that we have just acknowledged in our own lives. The fourth candle, this, in the service that I wrote talks about remembering our hurting world, where we are not just thinking about us, or people in our close community, but people around the globe. The fifth candle represents the gift that God has given us surrounding this very season, which was hope. And so, you can see they kind of walkthrough, and each one, in the middle of it, also has a verse of O Come, O Come Emmanuel. 

Laurie Graham 29:38
So, if you can just picture the flow of this service, there is an acknowledgment and a space for sadness, but it all leads straight to hope. In the service that I wrote, there’s an invitation to light a candle at the altar and for people to say prayers, and I do want to mention why, why liturgy, or written prayers or scriptures, is even more meaningful during something like a Blue Christmas service. If you are creating space and inviting people to come and sit in loss, or to allow themselves to really remember things that have caused pain, whether it is the death of a loved one, the loss of finances or health, or things like that, it puts people in a very vulnerable spot, and having the comfort of a service in order that you’re reading, that you’re following through, a tangible piece of paper like that you actually have almost a syllabus for the night or an order of service, there is a lot of comfort and strength that is in that when you’re inviting people to kind of open up and address some harder issues and emotions they might be feeling.

So please understand that I don’t always have this type of a set liturgical service set up in all worship areas, but for the Blue Christmas Service, I just wanted to mention why I really do believe that is a piece that I almost would say is necessary, as you’re inviting people to come in. It just has a comfort instability about it. So if you’re going to try a Blue Christmas service, I invite you just to try it! If it’s so different from what you’ve done in the past, try it anyway, and see how it works for you and how it flows. I think in ministry, we shouldn’t be too nervous about trying things that are outside our normal realm of the way that we do things, because God is so in the newness, and just doing something new and different can really open people up in new ways, really, to experience God and community in a whole new way. 

But a few other tips just about a Blue Christmas Service, if you do want to try one of your own. One is to keep it simple, the planning the decor, the setup. You don’t want to do fussy for the Blue Christmas Service. It is, again, slow and reflective, and it needs to keep the focus where the focus should be. Your presence at this, whether you are leading or helping to host it, matters much more than the setup or the decor, and when we get too fussy, we get very distracted. And so, we want to be very, very present and very sweet and very, I don’t know, just on task and seeing people. The setup itself should be set up way in advance with no rushing. If you do purchase the Blue Christmas bundle that I have or see some of the tips that I have in the free article online, because we have that as well, I would close the space as small as possible.

Laurie Graham 32:45
Like, change your seating if you need to, or add some dividers just to have it feel a little more intimate. For us, we curved our chairs, and we also added a few more aisles. We dimmed our lights. The room setup felt so much smaller with dividers and more intimate. And I also would encourage you to clean up the day after so that anyone at the end of the service doesn’t feel obligated or nudged to be part of the cleanup because I know in small churches that happens all the time. There are so many other tips that I could give you about the Blue Christmas Service, and if you do want to check out the bundle, we will drop the link in the show notes. Actually, there’s a few links we’ll drop in this show notes, and there’s a couple of free articles on our website, and there’s also this bundle for $29 that is just all made for you. Everything you would need is there including Canva images to advertise, like it’s, it’s super complete and pretty amazing! 

But I want to just answer just a couple other questions I’ve had about the Blue Christmas Service. One is a lot of people have said is it good for outreach? Or I had one person say yeah, it’s really not good for outreach. And I just want to say, it depends on how you define successful outreach. If you want numbers, if having a big number of people come, if that is outreach to you, then no, the Blue Christmas Service is not for numbers. It’s not for attracting the masses in your community. But if outreach to you is meeting needs in the community that aren’t being met, seeing people in new ways, building bridges between needs and Jesus, then I think it’s amazing outreach! Most churches do not do a service like this. It’s fairly new on the scene, but in addition to that, most people just don’t want to have this kind of a service. But because it’s new, people are also very unfamiliar. So, will it meet needs? Absolutely, it will for the people that come! 

Now, how would you invite people to come? One thing I would definitely do is if you’re making flyers or postcards or in social media, is just a call it a community event. We have learned that when we say hey come to our church for this, people, even though you’re inviting them all, they don’t feel invited, but if you actually call it a community event, instead of a church event, it’s a community event that’s held at your church, you tend to get a few more people who maybe wouldn’t have felt welcome otherwise. The other thing I would suggest doing is letting counselors or pastors in the area know that you’re doing this because counselors and pastors are constantly talking to people who have hurts and have pains. To let them know that this is happening and they could, you know, just nudge people toward this, could be really, really beautiful! What about combining with other churches in your community, say “Hey, I’d love to host a Blue Christmas Service. Do you want to do it together?”

Laurie Graham 35:40
There are so many amazing ways to partner with churches in your community, and this might be one of them. Because again, it’s not going to get 100 people, you may have 25, you may have 50, but this is a small intimate setting that has a very real reason to it. But to do something that isn’t being done by every other church is so amazing! You know what it’s like when every church in town is doing VBS and the same VBS, and everybody’s seeing it everywhere versus doing something new that meets a totally different way. Because it’s way time to normalize the reality of having hard, difficult feelings as a Christian, or being allowed to have these feelings in the church. We’ve had a decade or more of trying to sugarcoat everything with Jesus frosting and more, and declaring joy, and denying sadness, and we need to like get rid of all of that. Because when we’re denying the hard, difficult feelings, it totally confuses our body and our spirits, and it eventually blows up into so much unhealth.

Now, in the title of the podcast, I said, this might be the best year ever to do this. So why this year? I think we could probably actually say every year is a good year for this, but if you’re listening to this in 2022, or even a few years after that, you know, it’s been a few years since 2020 rocked our world with more than just a pandemic. We’ve now got a war going on in Ukraine. We have senseless shootings, crazy amounts of discrimination still happening. It’s not really like any year before or after were painfree either. There is always a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty. If we look back through human history, or even into the future, there always will be. So really, any year is a pretty beautiful year to offer a little bit of space and reflection, a place to acknowledge some of the difficult stuff while keeping our eyes on hope. Not a denial of pain, or fear, or confusion, or heartache, but the truth of the difficult life stuff that leads us to cling to Jesus, this little babe born in a manger, God incarnate, who conquered death, and is gone ahead of us to prepare a place for us! A place with no more tears, no more pain, and eternity with a God who loves us to no end. 

So, that’s what I want to suggest to you as we head into the holidays, allowing making space for the difficult stuff instead of being like the world, where we just turn on the Christmas carols, turn up the decorations, right, and the decor, and we almost go into a place of denial of reality. Let’s not do that. Let’s look at the Jesus story in context, from the beginning of creation as God has walked us through, and really leading to the hope that we have in Christ.

Laurie Graham 38:50
As I mentioned, we’re going to link a few things in the show notes. One is an article on the website called 12 Ideas to Reach Out to the Hurting and it actually includes Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas. Another is an article that’s called A Blue Christmas Service, How it Makes Space for Healing and Hope.

So again, that’s just a free article on the website, and again we do have a done-for-you resource that is pretty amazing and includes everything from a Setup Checklist to a Service Order Template to a Full Service Script with all the readings that are printable, printable and customizable Blue Christmas Service bulletin. It also includes the social media promotion, it’s all adaptable in Canva, printable postcard invites, and honestly just so much more. So, if you do want a made-fo-you kind of plug and play done-for-you resource and definitely you’ll want to check that out. You can actually find the bundle at smallchurchministry.com/christmasbundle, so smallchurchministry.com/christmasbundle.

And before we go if you do me a favor, it would mean the world for me if you would just leave a review for the podcast! We are constantly reaching more and more small churches around the globe. We’re so excited to be headed into a Worship and Tech Ministry Conference. It’s just a few weeks away now, and that is free for small churches everywhere with so much great stuff also just coming on the horizon. So, I’m grateful that you spent the time with me today. It really is my pleasure and honor to walk alongside you as we serve in small churches, just being a light where we are for Jesus. So until next week, be a light!