When Christmas falls on Sunday

Ok, so I know it is a year late, but I just came across this blog by Scot McKnight on the issue of whether to cancel the Christmas day service (2005). Many churches did and many Christians didn't like it. I read this blog cause Rick and I were considering not having a Sunday Service at all this Christmas Eve. The board didn't go for it and that's fine, but I hope they at least thought about it. If you are interested in this kinda topic, read the full post here. But click "read more" under here to see a few excerpts from it.

Here’s a fact consider: evidently, God thought a bundle of days were so important for the Jewish calendar that he gave laws both on the necessity of their annual celebration and he told them just how to celebrate that day. And Israel did just that.

Here’s something else to think about: evidently the same God didn’t think the same of Christmas, for there are no legislations about keeping but one “holiday”: the Lord’s supper. . . .

Does the NT teach a Sunday morning worship service? Well, the evidence isn’t what some are making it out to be. We need to be fair here: there is a distinction between what is taught and what is mentioned or hinted at as something practiced. And there is no clear text legislating that Christians are to meet for worship on a Sunday morning.

And it ought to be observed that there is, whether some will admit it or not, no clear connection between Christian worship on a Sunday and the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a day of “rest” while the Sunday was a time of “worship.” (See here A.G. Shead, New Dict. of Bibl. Theol, 749-50.) Not one shred of evidence here. In fact, the Apostle Paul says in Col 2:16 that one’s judgment about Sabbaths ought to be kept to oneself – or at least it ought not to be used as an instrument of judgment. (I have a hard time, and you probably do too, thinking Paul is letting ordinary Christians render judgment about when they were to “attend worship.”)

... let me poke some in the eye here: what I’m reading is that there is too much identification of “worship” with Sunday morning and too much identification of “being the church” with “attending a Sunday morning service.” I find this pretty surprising in that so many are making the case, pretty solidly I think, that “church” is not something done on Sunday mornings but something we “are” and “are all through the week” – climaxing at the Lord’s table and in Sunday worship. . . .

. . . another issue involved for many churches: the performance nature of the Christmas Eve service is so intense that there is nothing left for another service. Again, you might fight hard against the “performance” level and concentration (cantata, musical, theatricals, whatever), but argue that that and not that churches have lost their soul if they cancel Christmas Sunday services.

Does that wet your whistle? Go to http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=601 to reat the whole blog. Good stuff. . .