On Christmas Day, some churches rest

12:00 PM, Dec. 22, 2011

Tina Hutchison performs during the "Christmas at LifePoint 2011" 11:00 a.m. service on Sunday, December 18, 2011, at LifePoint Church in Smyrna. / Jeanne Reasonover/The Tennessean

Written by
Bob Smietana | The Tennessean

Most Sundays, cars pack the parking lots of local megachurches like CrossPoint and Oasis churches in Nashville, Long Hollow Baptist in Hendersonville, the People’s Church in Franklin and New Vision Baptist in Murfreesboro.

Those churches alone draw about 20,000 people to typical Sunday services. But this year, the calendar will change that.

For the fifth time since 1983, Christmas falls on a Sunday. That can be a problem for megachurches, which often use Christmas Eve as a major outreach event for newcomers. They sometimes run more than a dozen services in the days leading up to Christmas and rely on hundreds of volunteers per service.

So on Christmas Day, some will rest.

The Rev. Brady Cooper said it takes more than 150 volunteers to staff a single service at New Vision Baptist Church in Murfreesboro, including 52 in the preschool program alone. The church will run five services on Christmas Eve.

“Asking them to be there all day Christmas Eve and most of the day on Christmas is hard,” said Cooper. “Our staff is very thankful to have the chance to be home with their family.”

Crosspoint Church in Nashville will have 15 Christmas Eve services in five locations. The first started at 5 p.m. Thursday, the last at 6:30 p.m. Saturday. About 500 volunteers are involved.

“We are giving it all we’ve got,” said Rev. Pete Wilson, pastor of Crosspoint.

Wilson is encouraging church members to read the Christmas story from the Bible and pray together at home this Sunday.

At least one Nashville megachurch is taking the opposite approach.

Mt. Zion Baptist Church isn’t planning any Christmas Eve services. Instead, leaders are going all out on Christmas Day, seeing it as an opportunity that only comes around every seven years or so.

“We are having a birthday party for Jesus,” said Bishop Joseph Walker III, pastor of Mt. Zion.

Having church on Christmas Sunday gives Mt. Zion a chance to take the focus off commercialism and onto the gift of Jesus, Walker said. His congregation is inviting friends and family to be part of the celebration.

“The gospel is the birth the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus,” he said. “We always celebrate the death and resurrection – and nobody cancels church on Easter. Very rarely do we get to celebrate Christ’s birth on Christmas.”

Among the nation’s top 20 largest Protestant churches – as ranked by Outreach Magazine – three will be closed on Christmas, and 10 will be having only one service. But a survey from Nashville-based LifeWay Research found that 91 percent of Protestant churches overall plan services on Christmas Day this year, with 69 percent open on Christmas Eve as well.

American churches haven’t always celebrated Christmas, said Stephen Nissenbaum, author of The Battle for Christmas and professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts.

Celebrating Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681.

That was because the Bible, while it recounts Jesus’s birth, never tells people to celebrate it. And the Puritans disapproved of people using Christmas as an excuse to drink and sleep around.

“We tend to think of the old-fashioned Christmas being very religious,” said Nissenbaum, “but I don’t think it was.”

Some religious groups tried to make Christmas more Christian before the 1600s and failed.

“The Puritans knew it was a losing cause, and they decided not to try,” he said.

Protestant churches like Baptists and Methodists didn’t embrace Christmas till the mid-1800s. Before that, they saw it as too Catholic, said Paula Cooey, professor at Christian theology and culture at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. So they were closed on Christmas – unless it fell on a Sunday.

She’s not surprised that some megachurches are closing on Sunday. Those churches are often more like revival meetings – focused on attracting newcomers – than traditional churches that focus on weekly communion and liturgy.

Megachurches are also often run like businesses, she said.

“It’s not unusual to give their workers a day off for Christmas,” she said.

The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 2005, and some of the nation’s largest congregations, such Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, North Point Community Church near Atlanta, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, were all closed.

That year, critics claimed those churches were practicing consumer Christianity for not holding worship on Sunday and said they should be ashamed. This time, the reaction has been tamer. And some larger churches are holding one service with a few extra programs.

Willow Creek Church, which seats 7,000 people on its main campus, expects 80,000 people to attend their 12 Christmas Eve services, which run all week.

They’ll have one service on Sunday. Church spokeswoman Susan Delay said the main point is that people celebrate Christmas in some way.

“Whether it is at a service on Christmas Eve, on or Christmas Day, we believe it is important to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and the gift He is to all people,” she said in an email.

But that celebration can be done at home, some pastors contend. Lifechurch.tv, an Oklahoma-based megachurch with locations in five states, including one in Hendersonville, will be closed on Christmas.

The Hendersonville campus, which draws 2,000 people on weekends, will have seven Christmas Eve services at a converted movie theater on Indian Lake Boulevard.

“We celebrate Christmas all week with the church and then at home with the family on Christmas,” said Rev. Chuck Dennie, the campus pastor.

Contact Bob Smietana at 615-259-8228 or bsmietana@tennessean.com, or follow on Twitter @bobsmietana.


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