A recent survey by LifeWayResearch.com found that 79 percent of Americans surveyed believe that Christmas should be “more about Jesus.” Many churches use the Christmas season to host special services featuring the music of Christmas with special nativity displays and the retelling of the Christmas story. Some congregations use the occasion to evangelize on behalf of their faith.
However, some churches skip special events altogether on that day believing that “every day is a holy day.” The Quakers desire to observe those days the Bible emphasizes, such as Old Testament holy days, while others, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, do not celebrate birthdays at all including that of Jesus.
There is no headquarters for the autonomous Churches of Christ, a restorationist movement with between two and three million members worldwide, said Ralph Gilmore, a pastor in the denomination who teaches at a church school in Henderson, Tennessee. He said that a majority of the group’s 26,000 congregations play down the event. Gilmore cited, for the movement’s reasoning, a lack of biblical support. “The Bible does not indicate when the birth of Jesus was. There are a couple of reasons in scripture why we doubt it was December 25, in the middle of winter,” when it would not be unusual for Bethlehem to receive a dusting of snow and cold weather.
Churches of Christ try “to speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where the Bible is silent,” and thus say little about December 25 being the birthday of Christ. “There was no celebration in early days (of the church) and no mandate or suggestion to do so.” Gilmore went on to say that when he was a church pastor, “I would often talk about the birth of Jesus, because people had it on their minds. But most of us would not recognize it as a God-authorized holiday.”
Another community that doesn’t get caught up in the Christmas rush is the Religious Society of Friends, an Anabaptist movement commonly referred to as Quakers. Chris Pifer, a spokesman for one of the national Quaker groups refuses to observe Christmas at all because “every day is a holy day.” But not all of the nation’s 33,000 Quakers share that stance. Deb McCalister, a member of a Quaker group in the Dallas area, avoids lavish Christmas spending and decorations as a way to “live simply, so that others may simply live,” using some of the excess funds to support charitable projects in her community and elsewhere.
Mr. Pifer said, “There’s an effort within aspects of Quaker practice to try and explore and find primitive Christianity, the church before it became a political entity.” He said that “In very early Christianity there weren’t holidays like Christmas anywhere close to the form it is today.”
Perhaps the most conspicuous of Christmas-shunners are Jehovah’s Witnesses, millenialists whose ranks include 1.9 million members in the United States. Church spokesman J.R. Brown said that initially the group observed December 25 as a holiday but that one church official in 1928 led them to drop the observance. Brown said the Witnesses now ask themselves, “Does this please God when it is not mentioned in the scriptures?” He said that if Christmas observance were important, the Bible would contain instructions on how to honor the day.
On the other hand, he said, “If someone is dealing with you and says ‘Merry Christmas,’ we do not go into a sermon about the pagan origins. You don’t make an issue of it every time because we have to face the fact that they mean well when they say, ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.’” Many Jehovah’s Witnesses use December 25 as a day to go door-to-door sharing their message.
The 15-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has reason to believe that Jesus was actually born on April 6. However, the church takes advantage of the opportunities that Christmas brings to remember and to celebrate Jesus’ birth with other believers. The elaborate Christmas productions by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square are broadcast world-wide each Christmas season over thousands of television stations to an audience numbering in the millions.
Derek Morris, editor of Ministry Magazine, an international journal for pastors, said, “To totally ignore the season sends the message to some people that it doesn’t matter to me at all that the incarnation happened or that Christ was born.”
(Much of the above content is excerpted from Mark A. Kellner, “To Celebrate or Not,” Deseret News, Dec. 14, 2014)
I personally like what Bonnie Oscarson, a leader of young women, said: “This is a magical time of year when miracles happen, hearts are softened and the pure love of Christ is felt and experienced like no other time of the year. It is when we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God in the flesh.”
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