Is our Christmas outreach tinsel on the outside but Grinch on the inside?

Where do you place Christmas in the story of salvation? Your answer to this question reveals much about your understanding of the gospel. And it will powerfully shape the way you approach the festive season, evangelistically.

Some consider Christmas to be, essentially, the beginning of the story. Forgetting the Old Testament, this telling of the tale starts in Bethlehem, but climaxes far away at Golgotha. On this understanding, Christmas is the opening five minutes of the biopic, but the real action happens much further down the line.

Evangelistic dilemma

If you think like this then December will present you with a serious evangelistic dilemma. On the one hand you know the popular appeal of Christmas. People love mince pies, Christingles and nativity plays. So you may gladly leaflet the locality and invite your neighbours to carols by candlelight, but all along you wonder: ‘Am I using Christmas as the bait, when my real intention is to present a quite different message?’

The dilemma is real. How do we preach the true Christmas, when our visitors to church expect a tinselly Christmas? Certainly the culture domesticates the Christmas story and considers it ‘for the kids’. But what is our response?

Typically, evangelicals do not want to serve up empty festivities – heavy on the minced pies, light on the message. But here is our danger: we head in the other direction entirely.

Having got the punters through the doors with promises of mulled wine and an actual donkey, we then spend our time insisting that this is not really what we’re about. ‘The baby grew up!’, we insist. ‘Stop focusing on the manger! Let me crunch gears here and take you to this other thing called Easter where the real action happens.’ Our Christmas outreach is all tinsel on the outside, but once we’ve drawn a crowd we appear like Grinches on the inside. We say ‘Celebrate Christmas with us’, but then tell them ‘It’s not actually about Christmas after all.’

The final act, not the preamble

But it is. Christmas is not the dispensable preamble. It’s right at the climax of the story. This is why we need a proper gospel timeline. Let the Apostle Paul show the way:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. (Gal. 4:4-5)

God’s telling of the story begins way back before the creation of the world (John 1:1) and Christmas is way at the other end. In fact it initiates the decisive final act (John 1:14). To a people crying ‘O Come, O Come Immanuel’, Christmas comes as an almighty ‘Finally!’

Born to die

Christmas and Easter are not at opposite ends of the story, they hang together as the climax of the drama. In the manger is the Lamb destined to die, and on the cross is the Incarnate Son of the Father but, as the saying goes, the crib and the cross are cut from the same wood. In this light we start to see Christmas as the redemptive event it is. And we notice how cross-like it already appears: the perilous conditions of His birth; the poverty of the shepherds; the myrrh that marks Him for death; the Herodian genocide; all while Christ Himself is utterly exposed.

So, yes, our Christmas messages should resist the cosy domesticity of the chocolate-box nativity. But we need not rush past the manger ‘to get to the cross’. We can pause, look down and take note of this Redeemer, laid on the straw. There He is, stretched out, naked, upon the wood and struggling for breath. Remind you of anything? This is how God approaches a brutal and murderous world. Defenceless, He draws near, embracing the danger, death and blood. Christmas already preaches the cross – no crunch of gears necessary!

Fulfilment of the ages

Christmas is not merely the beginning of the story. It’s the fulfilment of the ages. We don’t need to hurry past it or downplay its significance. Having invited people to celebrate Christmas, we don’t need to tell them some other story. Christmas is not bait and Easter is not the hook. This December, we can dwell on the ‘little LORD Jesus’ and as we do so we are getting to the very heart of the good news. Christmas already preaches the gospel. Wonderfully, we get to join in.