Dear Sir,
Do we make the best use of carol services as an opportunity for evangelism? What do the non-churchgoers make of the readings? If you don’t know any Shakespeare, what would you get from half a page of it read out? Not much.
This last Christmas I attended two carol services. The first was one of the eight (!) carol services held by a large evangelical city church, total attendance maybe 4-5000. Their Sunday attendance is around 2500, so there must have been a lot of unbelievers present, even after allowing for friends like me from other churches. Several of the carols were unknown to me (I’m musically disadvantaged) and they had a talk of a fairly intellectual nature.
The second one was on the green of a village inhabited by mostly well-off commuters. The three churches had combined to lay it on. There were about 350 present, the usual total Sunday attendance at the churches being about 150. We had three or four readings, traditional carols and a prayer by the vicar. Near me was an Asian man holding a child in his arms.
I asked him: ‘Are you a Christian?’ (it’s quite OK to ask this of an Asian or African). ‘No’, he said, ‘I just came to see it’. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘It’s about Mary and Jesus. You know about them?’. ‘No’, he replied. ‘Well’, I said, ‘Jesus came from God, so he is able to help us when we pray to him. His mother was Mary, so he was also a man and he can sympathise with our problems. We can pray to Jesus anytime. Would you like me to pray for you and your little girl?’.
Even on a cold and windy evening a few simple sentences can prepare the way of the Lord. The minister on the green could have said that much; the big church minister could have adjusted to the secular culture of non-churchgoers.
A carol service is like an advertisement to the general public. You have to keep it simple.
Will you be reviewing your carol service outreach this year?
Yours faithfully,
