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What happens when Christmas is empty
Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a short series called ‘Rethinking Church’.1 1 One of the most important lessons from the series is that church cannot simply be ‘by rote’ or a performative ritual. God intended the church to be a living community of Christians with Christ at the centre. Now that the series has finished, as we approach Christmas I thought it would be worth taking a bit of time to reflect on that annual tradition. It struck me that Christmas serves as a perfect illustration of the problems with the church today that I’ve been highlighting, so I decided to write this as a sort of post-script to the series.
However, before diving in, let me first say that this is not going to be a rant about the secular Christmas. All my life I have heard Christians complaining about how secular Christmas is, how materialistic it is, how a lot of schools don’t even teach that it’s about Jesus, and so on. I’m sure we are all familiar with these criticisms, and have probably joined in with them from time to time! Christians moaning about Christmas has itself become a Christmas tradition! I’m not here to disagree with any of that — there are problems with Christmas as it is celebrated in society. However, what I want to talk about today is not secular Christmas but church Christmas.
I think the church itself has forgotten the real meaning of Christmas. Let me explain, starting with why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.
Why celebrate Christmas in the first place?
We don’t know exactly when the church started to celebrate Christmas as a separate feast. I found a fascinating article all about the origins of the church calendar, which says:
One conclusion that we may draw from this historical data is that the nativity of Christ was not widely observed in the church on December 25 until the late fourth or early fifth century.
That is not to say that Christians did not celebrate the nativity of Christ before that time. They certainly did! But the point is that December 25 was not regarded as a holy day by most Christians until pretty late in church history.
The church calendar is something that evolved over a very long period of time. Even after the first two or three ecumenical councils, the church calendar was still in a state of flux.2
The article makes clear that Christmas as a festival is not in the Bible. Nowhere does God say to the church, “commemorate the birth of Christ on 25th December each year”. Christmas was not celebrated in apostolic times, and only became widely celebrated through the centuries.
So, if it’s not in the Bible and the early church didn’t celebrate it, why did it begin?
I can think of a few reasons, two positive and two negative:
It was part of catechising people — that is, it helped the church to teach people the basics of the faith. It strikes me that you could teach through the Apostle’s Creed with the church calendar.3
It was a reminder of Christ’s presence among us. Christ didn’t come to earth in a ‘spiritual’ way only, but came as a man to dwell among us, and he is with us still by the power of the Holy Spirit.
As the church became more institutional, it started to resemble the Old Testament Israelites — and started to adopt the practice of annual feasts akin to the festivals in the Old Testament. The nativity of Christ is one of the most obvious moments in the gospels to celebrate as an annual feast.
An exercise of power: if you control people’s calendar, you exercise a lot of control over their lives — hence why the modern-day woke religion is so keen to take over our calendars with e.g. Pride Month and the like.
Notice that the first two positive reasons are things which the church should be doing all the time anyway: catechising people — i.e. obeying the great commission4 4 — and celebrating Christ’s presence among us. Christ’s presence is something which the church should be celebrating all through the year anyway, as I mentioned in the previous post about the Lord’s Supper. Both these reasons are spiritual in nature and require there to be a kind of spiritual reality about the church.
The second two (negative) reasons are more to do with the church as an institution, doing what institutions do — that is, giving more power to itself, ensuring that the church can’t simply function organically but has to conform to the strictures of the institutional church. With the institutional church, the ceremony will remain the same regardless of the inner spiritual reality: Christmas becomes a particular ritual that must be gone through rather than something with any particular spiritual significance or benefit.
It is, of course, for these second two reasons that I believe the church has gone wrong today. Christmas is still celebrated in churches up and down the country, but are they really teaching people to obey everything Christ commanded, and do they really believe that Christ is present today?
The way Christmas is celebrated in churches today reminds me a lot of Fake Manufactured Love Day — also known as Valentine’s Day.
Christmas = Valentine’s Day?
I’m not sure whether Valentine’s Day is such a big thing any more — maybe younger people in ‘situationships’ don’t do Valentine’s Day like they used to. Maybe people don’t really believe in love and romance any more. However, when I was growing up, Valentine’s Day was a big thing: anyone in a relationship had to express their love and devotion to their spouse by buying them a card and (ideally) a present. The bigger / more expensive the card and present, the greater the love. By contrast, woe betide you if you forgot! Forgetting to buy your spouse a card / present showed that you didn’t really love them.
Obviously, common sense dictates that buying your significant other a card / gift on one day in the year really says nothing about the quality of your relationship. Personally, I believe you need to be showing your husband or wife that you love them every day of the year. If you don’t love them day-by-day, sending a card once a year is hardly going to make up for it!
It’s like that with Christmas. If we’re not teaching people about Jesus all year round, and celebrating the presence of Christ in our midst all year round, then what’s point of Christmas? It’s empty!
“But,” you might say, “surely churches DO teach people about Jesus all year round and celebrate Christ in our midst all year round?!”
Sadly, I’ve come to believe that this is generally not the case. I’ve spoken about this many times over the last few years, but if you’d like to understand where I’m coming from do check out some of my previous posts e.g. this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
What I am saying is, in a nutshell, the way the church celebrates Christmas today is akin to a married couple who are always apart and rarely ever exchange a kind word to one another sending each other loved-up Valentine’s Day cards.
There was a particular moment of clarity for me when I saw the problem — Christmas 2021. At that time, I was still part of a Church of England church. Although the covid restrictions were over by then — legally at least — the church was still operating very cautiously. Chairs were spaced a metre apart, and people were encouraged not to mix. (It seems more and more insane to me as I look back on that time.) I remember walking out of one of the carol services to get some fresh air, and looking in at the pub across the road where families were sitting close together and everything looked happy and normal. It struck me that the pub actually embodied more of the gospel at that point than the church. That night summed up for me everything that was wrong with Christmas in the church: it didn’t really believe the message it was proclaiming — it was empty.
A great ‘evangelistic opportunity’?
There’s one purpose of Christmas which I haven’t mentioned yet. If you asked church leaders these days what the point of Christmas is, I suspect most of them would say something about it being a great “evangelistic opportunity”. When else would you get thousands of people attending church who don’t usually come — even people who don’t call themselves Christians? What an opportunity for people to hear the message of the gospel and the message of the Bible!
The problem, as I discussed in this piece on Understand the Bible, is that the church has gone wrong when it comes to evangelism in general. Christ didn’t call the church to evangelise — he called it to make disciples. There’s a subtle but highly important distinction there. A church full of well-taught Christians, full of the Spirit, would not need an annual event to attract people.
I wonder if this is why this supposedly unsurpassed “evangelistic opportunity” doesn’t have that much of an impact: anecdotally, of all the people I can think of who have become Christians, only a small percentage of them came at Christmas. Why does the church plough so much time and energy into this supposedly golden evangelistic effort, when it seems to have so little result? At my old church, we used to run ourselves ragged every year putting on as many Christmas events as we could manage. But the more events we put on never seemed to lead to more fruit in terms of people coming to Christ.
Perhaps this is because churches need to change what they do at Christmas time: rather than continuing with the normal pattern of sermons, many churches change their events to be ‘outsider friendly’. But, if you have to change things to make things friendly to visitors, why should they be expected to come back when things go back to normal? This seems to be one of the logical fallacies of church’s evangelistic thinking — they think they need to do something different to attract outsiders, whereas all we really need is the presence of Christ in our midst (1 Corinthians 14:24-25).
One unfortunate side-effect of putting on so many Christmas services is that churches neglect their regulars in order to do more ‘evangelism’. In my experience, churches tend to focus exclusively on visitors at Christmas time, rather than trying to help Christians grow in their understanding of the nativity and what it means for Christ to be present in our lives every day. As I said in my piece on Understand the Bible, this is counter-productive: well-taught and mature Christians are a far more effective evangelistic force than any number of Christmas services.
What use is a light which doesn’t shine?
The biggest issue I have with Christmas in the church today is the disconnect between what Christmas should be and what the church has made it into. Christmas should be a celebration of Christ’s presence among us (even if, like I said, churches should be celebrating that all the time). Christ’s presence should be a light, as it says in one of the passages that are often read in Christmas services:
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.Isaiah 9:2
If there was ever a time when we need the light of Christ to shine out, this is it. Obviously there have been many dark times in history, and I’m not trying to claim that what we are going through at the moment is uniquely dark. But I’m sure I don’t need to go through all the reasons why the world seems like a pretty scary and dangerous place at the moment — wars, political upheaval, financial problems, school problems, mental health, family breakdown, loneliness… you could go on and on and on.
But, is the church really showing the light of Christ to the world? Is it shining with the love of Christ, or is it simply going through the motions of reading the same old readings and singing the same tired old carols? Will singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing for the umpteenth time really bring people to Christ? Will another nativity scene or play help? I truly believe that the majority of visitors come to church without ever being challenged about what Christmas means for them in the rest of the year — they simply want the soothing comfort of a familiar tradition. Most churches are simply happy to give it to them.
At its root, I wonder if the real problem with Christmas in the church is that the church has stopped believing in Christmas. Christmas is just another set of activities to do, another list to get done. Rather than sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to what he has to say about how we do things, churches tend to just get on the hamster wheel of events and do them the same way they’ve always done them.
If we want to see real change, this Christmas time, maybe we need to rethink Christmas and — for 2026 and beyond — rethink church.
Footnotes
- You can find a link to all the parts in the final post. ↩︎
- From The Origins of the Church Calendar. ↩︎
- I did actually do a teaching series on the Apostle’s Creed, you can find all the videos on this playlist. ↩︎
- Matthew 28:19-20, “…go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” ↩︎
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