How Christmas Can Move Your Mission Forward
The Christmas season is nearing. We get ready for swelling pews and extra services, and we celebrate Jesus as the reason for the season.
Christmas does come, however, with a risk for church leaders and their teams. The additional activity requires an additional focus on operations, rightly so, but it can pull focus away from the relational side of Christmas. You can get people in and out of the parking lot with efficiency, but that’s not ultimately a mission-driven action. In brief, your church can run the risk of being operationally strong, and relationally poor.
What can you do as church leaders, to turn Christmas into a catalyst for growth? Instead of just “producing” Christmas, what can you do to raise up the goals of your church?
Setting Goals as a Team
We wrote about gospel-centered goal-setting in our last blog, and this principle is even more relevant during Christmas.
We’ve seen success with teams revisiting their missional goals and the larger strategy of the church prior to the onset of the busy seasonal activity. Cementing your church in your mission and gospel-centered goals, and then viewing Christmas as an integrated part of your strategy rather than a stand-alone season, can turn Christmas into a fulcrum that elevates your missional goals.
Big Vision, Bite-Sized Goals
Christmas reminds us of the important relationship between vision and goals. Our tendencies are to create a big vision with big goals, or a small vision with small goals. The former is inspiring but unproductive, and the latter is productive but uninspiring. A big vision generates inspiration, and bite-sized goals generate progress toward that vision.
In the context of Christmas, we can get caught up with the spirit of the holiday, and lose sight of smaller missional actions; or, get burnt out managing programmatic tasks that don’t seem tied to spirituality.
Returning to gospel-centered goals that are tied to a broad vision but have small, doable steps attached can keep the inspiration of the Christmas season on high while making room for actions that benefit the long-term goals of your church.
Functional Flexibility
Another important aspect of the Christmas season that applies year round is functional flexibility. While at Clarity House, we help church leaders set 90-day goals as standard practice, we also know that some churches function better with 120-day goals. Trying to constrain them to a 90-day plan may work against their mission, rather than for it.
Sometimes at Christmas, we find ourselves being flexible by default—the changes in service times means the rest of the week changes, too, and we adapt accordingly, while still keeping all other church functions running. Keeping this sense of planning with purpose while functioning with flexibility is a Christmas lesson we can benefit from through every season of the church calendar.
Congregants often view Christmas as their “favorite” time of year. The worship and the fellowship stir deeper connections to the church in their hearts. Church leaders have a prime opportunity to nurture this deeper connection by integrating Christmas into the missional strategy of the church, and carrying the spirit into the rest of the year.
Questions to Guide Your Team in Applying These Ideas
Use the questions below to guide your team through a discussion about how you can apply these ideas in your specific context?
1. What is the most important, shared disciple-making goal we want to have made progress on by mid-2025?
2. Instead of all the energy being directed toward Christmas limiting our ability to make progress in that direction, what are several ways we can leverage this Christmas season to make progress in the direction of the goal described in point 1 above?
3. What one thing will each of us/or our departments commit to doing—or stop doing—to more closely align all of our activities with our disciple-making goal?
At Clarity House, we specialize in guiding church teams in articulating a shared vision coupled with disciple-making clarity. We’d love to help you and your team. If you want us to assess your current mission statement, feel free to set up a free conversation with our team.