A Pastor’s Christmas Experiment

This blog is from Joel Adams.  Joel is an ordained minister who is discovering how God is calling him and his family into the next season of missional life.  He is currently not serving a church but is wondering what God is up to and what neighborhood God may be inviting them to join what he is already doing.

Last Christmas, my wife Juli and I lived in the small rural town of Olney, Illinois.  I served as pastor of the local Presbyterian Church there.  In this town, like many small towns across America, life often centered upon family.  And when holidays rolled around, we really experienced the centrality of family life.  One Thanksgiving, I drove out to the local Wal-Mart to pick up something we forgot for dinner.  That year, our families could not travel out to join us.  As I drove, I noticed a few houses surrounded by lots of cars.  Families gathered to celebrate.  In our time there, we discovered that as families gather they naturally turn inward and over time figured the Pastor and his family had their own plans. 

Well when Christmas rolled around we knew our families and our friends would not be able to join us.  Worse than that, the one family that always remembered us and invited us to join their family celebration had moved away!  We spent a few days with long faces and whimpers of self pity.  Then it hit us.  We talk about missional and moving into our neighborhood.  We have read Al Roxburgh and many others about cultivating the missional imagination, lifestyle, posture and whatever else.  So we wondered, what if in our everyday going about, we invited those whom we met who had no place to go on Christmas Eve to our house?  And so we did. 

We started safely with a widow who recently had moved back to town and whose only family member had other plans.  Then a young man called wondering what time the Christmas Eve service would be.  He would be the only member coming from his adult group home because everyone else would be with their family.  He about jumped through the phone at our invitation.  Then we invited another widow who we had befriended over the years in our neighborhood.  We also invited her son and grandchildren who spent a whole lot of time in our house playing with our kids.  We kept going down the street and before long we had several yeses to our invitation.  Some folks even danced up and down in joy when we invited them. 

Now, right about mid afternoon of Christmas Eve day, I had a holy crud moment.  Holy crud, we are going to have a bunch of folks we really do not know in our home.  And these folks are a lot different than us!  We made the soup and put the sandwich plates out.  Folks started coming and before long our house was full of people.  It was the best Christmas Eve.  We talked, laughed, ate a ton and chased each other around the house.  Juli and the kids prepared the Christmas gospel story into reading parts and passed out parts to people who wanted to join in.  We gathered in our living room and joined in hearing the story of Christ’s birth and God’s grand entrance into our hurting world.  Many of these folks were not church folk.  Some were.  God was up to something and what a joy to be part of it.  We were not alone.  Instead we celebrated with beautiful people, who also longed to be part of something greater.  We knew this is the lifestyle we wanted to live.  We knew God was calling us and stirring in us to step out and join in the next season of missional life.  Could we do this full time as missionaries within a neighborhood? 

Well you will have to keep your eyes and ear open to learn about some of the answers to those questions.  In the meantime, what are the obstacles you face that keep you from really moving into your neighborhood and meeting your neighbors and inviting them into your life?