Christmas Candlelight Service

Each year, the Sunday before Christmas, we put together a unique worship gathering at The Grove. There are several things that are different about this service. For starters, it is a family worship gathering, meaning that all of the kids (above the age of 1 year old) join us in worship. In addition to that, we arrange the room in "the round", with the musicians in the middle of the room instead of on the stage. That leads to a really intimate feel since lots of people can see each other as they are worshipping. We structure the flow of the gathering quite differently also: all christmas carols, several videos (one of which is a Veggie Tales clip), scripture reading (by 6 year old Jordan Maass), advent reading (by the Harper family), shortened, kid-friendly teaching, children's time led by Drew, etc.

One of my favorite parts of the service is the ending. After the teaching, we sang What Child is This, O Come All Ye Faithful and Silent Night while we passed candlelight around the room. After a few minutes, the lights were off and everyone was holding a small candle as they sang. During O Come All Ye Faithful, I took one of my ear monitors out of my ear so that I could really hear the crowd well as they sang. When we got to one of the last choruses and sang "for He alone is worthy", I immediately developed a lump in my throat and I had to stop singing. Why? Well, it just hit me that everyone in the room was singing these lines declaring that this baby who would be the Savior is the ONLY one who is worthy. Not Santa, not Buddha, not anyone in the room... NO ONE ELSE. Wow. Sometimes God just opens up your heart and mind and really shows you how great He is. That was one of those times. I think the sense that Jesus is the ONLY important aspect of Christmas was very tangible as we all joined together to worship Him.

On a related note, this has been our goal as a family for the past few years. To make Jesus the focus of Christmas. That's not always easy with the commercialism that saturates the season (Wal-Mart started putting out Christmas decorations like life-sized Santas on October 1st this year). If there is any single memory that I want our girls to have years from now it is that Christmas is about Jesus. There's nothing wrong with Christmas trees, cookies, lights, Christmas songs. I love all of those things... they really are a part of the beauty of the Christmas season to me. But the focus, the crux, the most important thing is Jesus.