Kevin McCullough, December 11, 2005

I had just hung up the phone with the Washington Post religion reporter Alan Cooperman. He interviewed me this week looking for a reaction to the fact that the White House Christmas card, for the fifth year running, had no mention of Christmas on it.

I am after all a natural to ask about it. I am the one who is trying to spear head the effort to get ardent fans of Christmas to send Christmas greetings to the scrooges at the ACLU national headquarters in New York City.

I told Mr. Cooperman that I was disappointed with the White House's choice to bypass a true Christmas greeting on the card. I also explained that there is a significant difference between an aggressive ACLU organization which is looking to litigate against every municipality, school district, and government employee that dare celebrate Christmas on the public dime, and an elected leader who truly wishes more than a million supporters of many various faiths a prosperous holiday season.

Mr. Cooperman ended up not using my comments in his piece; however my editor in chief Joseph Farah represented what I thought very nicely in the same column.

Moments later I was perusing the news of the day and ran across a piece from the Associated Press that ran in hundreds of newspapers that day. The story was highlighting the fact that many Mega-Churches will be closing their doors on Christmas Sunday this year.

The story highlighted several churches - all of several thousand congregants that are making the educated guess that attendance would be low and are deciding not to offer their members the chance to worship the Christ child, on the day of His birth.

The most nakedly exposed pragmatism came from Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.

Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church, said "church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources."

She went on to say, "If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don't go to church, how likely is it that they'll be going to church on Christmas morning?"

Ask anyone who walks if there are two specific times that the ''unchurched" would be more likely to attend church and you will hear the words, "Christmas" and "Easter."

And if this isn't an interesting, yet pathetic snapshot of what the Seeker Church movement has turned into...

A church by definition is an institution ordained by God to be a place of worship and learning, helping those seeking the truth about God and pointing them in the direction they should go. Seeker-friendly churches seem arrogant enough to believe that until they arrived on the scene - nobody ever had meaningful searches for God.

But to add insult to injury, here we are attempting to prick the fingertip of the ACLU with a bit of God consciousness this year, and wish them a Merry Christmas by explaining what Christmas means to us, and yet those places that should be an open door to understanding that freely, are locking their operations on Christmas Sunday - because they are too lazy to put in the time and spend the money it would take to do so (by their own admission).

As I raised the issue on my broadcast this week, one very nice lady called in from the Bronx to explain that her family is one of those volunteer families who works when they are at church, and that she would personally love to have the idea of the day off to not have to worry about those services responsibilities. "It's just so hard to get up on that day," she said.

Hard?

Too hard to prepare a message, if you are a pastor? Too hard to sing a song, if you are a worship leader?

Hard is not quite what I envision.

Hard is seeking a place to give birth in the dead of winter, and being told that not even a hotel room is available. Hard is being forced to experience labor on sticky, uncomfortable hay, with the smell of animals, and only a manger to lay your newborn in. Hard is not having the conveniences of the hospital delivery room, but instead experiencing your bloody, and messy delivery in a stable.

Hard to me is also dragging a cross upon one's back up a way of suffering, only to be nailed to that same cross on a hill called "the skull."

Maybe mega-church is synonymous for mega-wimps. For when we start talking about the amount of effort to worship the Christ of Christmas on His day, and we say its too hard, I'm afraid we've lost a grip on reality.

Here's hoping that you so seek an open door to a house of worship on Christmas Sunday morning, that in fact you are able to find one!

Kevin McCullough is heard daily in New York City, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware on AM 570 WMCA and AM 970 WWDJ from 2-5pm.

Copyright © 2005 Kevin McCullough