Sunday, November 27, 2011

Our New Christmas Direction

This year we are spending less on Christmas presents for our children, instead we are giving them money... that they can give away to bless others in our community or around the world. Let me explain.

I love how God combines things in my life, converges them from different ideas into a single idea or direction.  Of late, this is how God has been teaching me. Let me tell you about the 3 converging themes / ideas which has led to our change this Christmas.

First, I'm not really a fan of Christmas. There, I've said it. Really, though I love Jesus and I love the epic-ness of the Christmas story.  I love how the whole of history prepared mankind for this moment of our redemption by God. Like the stories of Noah or Moses, Ezra and Nehemiah or Ruth, I love how God shows himself plainly and redeems his people. What I don't like is the commercialization of Christmas - I don't like what we've made it into, and what it makes my children into if I am not careful. I simply believe that greed was not designed to be a part of the celebration of the birth of Jesus.

Second, a few years ago at New Minas Baptist Church we taught through the Advent Conspiracy movement. For me, this has wrecked the material version of the Christmas celebration.  And why shouldn't it? Again, greed and Christmas - they simply are not compatible in my opinion.  The main premise of the AC movement is that we should give time and relationships not money - presence not presents. Then, instead of using the money we would have spent on ourselves, we should give it away to others in a life impacting, world impacting way. The first year as an extended family we did a little of this, several people gave others gifts from Compassion Canada.

Third, and truly this theme came after we made our family decision, but the impact was a clarifying one for me. This theme made clearer what and how we feel we are being called to teach our children. In a recent NMBC staff meeting and later in a sermon, Pastor Bob shared the key statement from an Andy Stanley book: "Your Direction, not Your Intention, Determines Your Destination." Essentially, where you are currently headed determines where you will end up, not the good ideas you have of where you'd like to go. For example, if you want to have a great relationship with your family, but yet you are not spending large amounts of quality time with them, the likelihood of you having the relationship you desire is very low.


So here is the convergence - a change in our family celebration of Christmas. Every year we have had a set budget for what we spend per child at Christmas time. This year as we talked about Christmas with our children we saw the ugly head of greed show itself in some of their comments. Not in blatant ways, but more subtly. We decided that to arrive at the destination of our children seeing Christmas as being about the generosity of God in the gift of Jesus, that we needed to change our current direction.

Knowing that there are people and families in our world with much [much!] greater need than our own, and knowing that Jesus and greed cannot be celebrated together, we've made this change:


Instead of spending our whole budget per child we are dividing it in half. We will use half of our budget per child and give gifts to them. The other half we will help them to give away. They can choose to give it to a specific need, person or family in our community, or to a cause which is making a difference in another part of the world. They can choose to give it to something themselves, or they can team up with other children in our family to have a larger pool of money for that person, family or cause. We will help them decide what to do and how to do it. When we discussed the idea with our children they became very excited! Immediately, our Christmas celebration has taken on a different flavor, we are heading in a different direction, and, with God's help, we will arrive as a family at a different destination in terms of our celebration this Christmas.


This Christmas, rather than celebrating Jesus and greed - which we all do so well in North America - instead, let's teach our children about generosity. Let's help our children to understand God's amazing gift of Jesus Christ, his son, and our redeemer.