Advent

Every December, churches across the United States prepare for an influx of visitors, but fewer Americans than ever are including church in this year’s Christmas plans. According to a Lifeway Research study, only 47% of U.S. adults say they typically attend church during the holiday season, while 48% admit it’s not on their agenda, and 5% remain undecided. While 9 in 10 Americans do something to celebrate Christmas, less than half typically attend church at Christmastime today.

The study reveals a sharp divide in Christmas church attendance, particularly among the religiously unaffiliated—a group growing fastest among younger demographics. While 71% of this group say they’re unlikely to attend church at Christmas, 40% admit they might consider it if personally invited by someone they trust.

Among those who do attend, the motivations are surprisingly diverse. Sixty percent of Christmas churchgoers say their attendance stems from faith, but others are only doing it to keep up with tradition (16%), appease family and friends (15%), or simply embrace the festive ambiance (8%).

As churches prepare for Christmas Eve services — often the highest-attended service of the year — the message is clear: intentional outreach matters.

Christmas might be a time for vacations, but it sure does require plenty of work. It turns out families are dedicating a staggering amount of time to Christmas preparations over their lifetimes. A survey of festivity enthusiasts reveals that holiday preparations consume almost five years of their lives.

The most substantial chunk of time goes to planning Christmas dinner, consuming nearly two-and-a-half years of preparation over a lifetime. In addition to meal planning, hosts spend a remarkable 164 weeks cleaning and tidying before welcoming holiday guests.

The decorating process itself presents its own time demands. People spend more than two days adorning their Christmas trees, and 34 hours untangling lights. For those with real trees, an additional 36 hours are spent picking up or vacuuming pine needles over a 63-year period.

The research also highlights the stress associated with holiday preparations, with 60% of respondents finding the season stressful and 45% wishing for ways to make it less so. The cost-of-living crisis has amplified these concerns, with 41% expecting this Christmas to be more stressful than last year.

Despite these challenges, people maintain their enthusiasm for the season. The survey revealed that spending time with family and friends (44%), enjoying festive food and drink (41%), and giving presents (34%) rank as the nation’s favorite aspects of Christmas.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Christmas; Contentment; Fellowship; Hospitality - As we prepare for Christmas, it's important to reflect on how we're spending our time. Are we dedicating our efforts to what truly matters, like family, fellowship, community, and the essence of Christmas? Or are we getting caught up in distractions that create stress and detract from the fundamental values of togetherness and the true meaning of the season?

This holiday season, take a moment to ask yourself, “Does this person really want what I’m buying them?” A new survey finds the answer is likely no! Researchers have found that more than half of Americans (53%) will receive a gift they don’t want.

It turns out that everyday Americans are throwing away tons of money. According to a survey, unwanted presents will reach an all-time high in both volume and cost this year, with an estimated $10.1 billion being spent on gifts headed for the regifting pile.

Overall, the annual holiday spending forecast finds that roughly 140 million Americans will receive at least one unwanted present. Shockingly, one in 20 people expect to receive at least five gifts they won’t want to keep. The average cost of these unwanted items is expected to rise to $72 this holiday season, up from $66 last year. That represents a billion-dollar surge in wasteful holiday spending.

Saying “you shouldn’t have…” might be a more truthful statement than ever when it comes to certain gift ideas. Topping the unwanted gift list are:

Clothing and accessories (43%)
Household items (33%)
Cosmetics and fragrances (26%)
Technology gifts (25%)

So, what happens to all these well-intentioned but unwanted presents?

Regifting is the most popular solution (39%)
Return the item to the store to exchange for something else (32%)
Sell the unwanted gift (27%)

So, if you’re still looking for last-minute gifts this holiday season, choose wisely. There’s a very good chance the person you’re buying for won’t like your choices anyway.

Possible Preaching Angle:
You can use this story to remind people that the only gift that is universally appropriate in the gift of God’s Son. But in the same way, many people reject this costly gift as unnecessary and unwanted (John 1:11-12).

The great scientist Albert Einstein said that he stood on the shoulders of James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist. Maxwell’s insights into electromagnetism laid the foundation for the communication technologies we enjoy today.

In 1873 Maxwell delivered an essay at Cambridge titled “On Determinism and Free Will.” In that address Maxwell spoke about miracles, which he called “singular points.” A singular point occurs within history, but its occurrence is so infrequent and so relatively small that when it occurs, the finite mind cannot grasp its force for change. For example, in 1809 all the world was looking at Napoleon’s vast military exploits. Yet who noticed that a baby named Abraham was born that same year in northern Kentucky in a tiny log cabin? Retrospectively, of course, the world can now see the significance of that hour, which opened up a chance for this ship of state to be guided through the storms and into safe harbor, thereby preserving the Union and freeing those in the bondage of slavery. A singular point.

According to Maxwell, history is replete with these miracles that have changed the destiny of civilizations. A single person, a small group, an idea, a book—all can be points at which the vital moves the massive. We cannot see singular points of history in their origins. We can only grasp their significance years if not eras later.

“Any assessment of history which does not take into account the possibility of miracles is a false assessment of history,” said Maxwell. H.G. Wells named names: “I am a historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”

Author Philip Yancey writes:

Where I live in the Rocky Mountains, you can see several thousand stars with the naked eye on a clear night. All of them belong to the Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars, including an average-sized one that our planet Earth orbits around—the Sun.

Our galaxy has plenty of room: 26 trillion miles separate the Sun from the star nearest to it. And traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 25,000 years to reach the center of the Milky Way from our home planet, which lies out in the galaxy’s margins.

Until a century ago, astronomers believed the universe consisted of our galaxy alone. Then, in the 1920’s, Edwin Hubble proved that one apparent cloud of dust and gas in the night sky, named Andromeda, was actually a separate galaxy. Now there were two. When NASA launched a large telescope into space for a clearer view, they appropriately named it after Hubble.

In 1995, a scientist proposed pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at one dark spot, the size of a grain of sand, to see what lay beyond the darkness. For ten days, the telescope orbited Earth and took long-exposure images of that spot. The result, which has been called “the most important image ever taken,” would astonish everyone. It turns out that tiny spot alone contained almost 3,000 galaxies!

Scientists now believe that if you had unlimited vision, you could hold a sewing needle at arm’s length toward the night sky and see 10,000 galaxies in the eye of the needle. Move it an inch to the left and you’d find 10,000 more. Same to the right, or no matter where else you moved it. There are approximately a trillion galaxies out there, each encompassing an average of 100 to 200 billion stars.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How should we adapt to this humbling new reality? Back when people assumed the universe comprised a few thousand stars, a psalmist marveled in prayer, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:3–4).

The answer, of course, is found in the New Testament revelation that God loves the world so deeply (John 3:16) that he sent his Son in the form of a servant (Phil. 2:6-7) to die for humanity. In an act of humility beyond comprehension, the God of a trillion galaxies chose to “con-descend”—to descend to be with—the benighted humans on this one rebellious planet, out of billions in the universe.

Carrie McKean writes in an article on Christianity Today online:

When I think about the night of Jesus’ birth, the first picture that comes to mind is straight from my childhood. It’s like I’m peering into a snow globe manger scene. Snow falls softly, blanketing the hillside in a carpet of quiet. All is calm. All is bright. Give it a good shake, the snow gently swirls, then settles over the pristine couple and silent baby once again.

But that image is quickly crowded by another. 15 years ago, my husband and I lived in a dusty Chinese village on the outskirts of Beijing. We volunteered for four years at New Day Foster Home, a private, Christian nonprofit organization. In those days…they helped fund surgeries and provided long-term foster care for medically fragile orphans. We lived in an apartment complex about a mile from the organization’s campus, and most mornings we walked behind a flock of sheep and their shepherd on our way to work.

You could smell that shepherd’s stable before you saw it. Fetid and filthy, the sheep crowded in at the end of a day. In the summer, flies buzzed. In the winter, sludge froze solid. I would pass the sheep and their shepherd, pitying him a little. Around Christmas, I pictured my Savior born amid fresh, sweet hay in an inexplicably warm and comforting stable. The snow globe in my mind was just how I wanted to imagine Jesus’ entrance into the world. But the stable I walked past told the truth: Stables smell like dirty sheep.

I wanted to throw a snow globe against a brick wall. That clean Nativity was plastic, fraudulent, and fake. I felt angry at myself for all the ways I’d cheapened and tamed the gospel. My own faith felt fake and plastic too.

The world I saw outside my window needed a God-become-flesh in circumstances far messier than those perfect little snow globes. And here was this shepherd and his sheep, upending my picture of the Incarnation and revealing that the lack was in my seeing, not in Christ’s coming.

There’s no way around the fact that incarnation means coming to a filthy and fetid world, just like that stable in China…. It’s a world with disease and mental illness. A fallen creation groans with earthquakes, floods, and fires. Sorrow, unending sorrow. It is all too dirty, and yet he came near.

Jesus is God-made-flesh who doesn’t ask us to clean up the mess before he comes. He enters into our messes, always, always with us. He put on human skin…willingly emptying himself (Phil. 2:5-8), becoming a shepherd for you and me, a bunch of dirty sheep (John 10:11). He didn’t leave us in our squalor but led us to green pastures—to healing, rescue, and restoration of our souls (Ps. 23). I love a God who sees dirty sheep and tends them himself.

Gift cards make great stocking stuffers—just as long as you don’t stuff them in a drawer and forget about them after the holidays. Americans are expected to spend nearly $30 billion on gift cards this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. Restaurant gift cards are the most popular, making up one-third of those sales.

Most of those gift cards will be redeemed. Paytronix, which tracks restaurant gift card sales, says around 70% of gift cards are used within six months. But many cards—tens of billions of dollars’ worth—wind up forgotten or otherwise unused. That’s when the life of a gift card gets more complicated, with expiration dates or inactivity fees that can vary by state.

After clothing, gift cards will be the most popular present this holiday season. Nearly half of Americans plan to give them, according to the National Retail Federation. But many will remain unspent.

Gift cards get lost or forgotten, or recipients hang on to them for a special occasion. In a July survey, Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher. The average value of unused gift cards is $187 per person, a total of $23 billion.

While it may take gift cards years to expire, experts say it’s still wise to spend them quickly. Some cards—especially generic cash cards from Visa or MasterCard—will start accruing inactivity fees if they’re not used for a year, which eats away at their value. Inflation also makes cards less valuable over time. And if a retail store closes or goes bankrupt, a gift card could be worthless.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, the gifts of God (his promises, salvation, spiritual gifts, talents, the Bible) often remain unused, unopened by faith, and neglected by so many people.

A pub has been reusing the same 77-year-old Christmas decorations in its public bar for more than 60 years. Landlord David Short, 84, first put up the crepe paper streamers and paper lanterns in the Queen's Head, Newton, Cambridgeshire, in 1962.

His son Rob Short, who took over the pub 10 years ago, said his father made the ribbons when he was about seven. He said, "It's amazing they survived as the pub has had some quite raucous evenings over the years. But the thing about them is you can mend them quite easily and put them back up again."

Short, 50, is the third generation of his family to run the Queen's Head. "At Christmas, we're known for our festivities and the decorations are a big part of that. I think people like them because they're traditional and I'm sure they wouldn't fit into a lot of places, but because the pub is very traditional, it fits into the whole ethos of the place."

Mr. Short's father puts the yellow, red and green ribbons up each year because he "is the only one to know how to put them up, it's a bit of a technique - I have been learning a little.” While it can take his regulars "a while to notice they're up, it's almost part of the pub," visitors do notice them because "you just don't get to see decorations like that anymore".

The streamers are carefully rolled up and stored away in a cupboard every year. Mr. Short said: "It's going back to the make-do-and-mend generation, I suppose, and that's what we should all be doing, reusing things - so it's quite relevant to these days as well."

You can see pictures of the decorations here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Church - Leaders have discovered that their church congregations appreciate the “old” traditions of hymns, Nativity plays, candle ceremonies, the four-week observance of Advent, and others. 2) Family, Traditions - This is also true in the family home where celebrating Christmas with nostalgic tree ornaments, reading the Christmas story, and door-to-door caroling bring back warm family memories.

We used to have a short Halloween season, a nice slow-paced Thanksgiving, and then around mid-November we'd see Christmas stuff out for sale. Well, now these three events are getting mashed together in what one author calls a "HalloweenthanksgivingChristmaspalooza."

Ellyn von Huben notes, "I've noticed that so much of society's sense of holiday celebrations has been condensed that it is hard to even see what holiday we are headed toward."

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story (and her wonderful new word to describe this season) provides a great way to help your congregation slow down, take a deep breath, and focus on Christ and the true meaning of Advent, which Von Huben defines at "The time in which we prepare our hearts for the celebration of Our Lord made flesh to dwell among us."

Britain's so-called "loneliest sheep," which was stuck at the foot of a remote cliff in Scotland for at least two years, has been rescued. Cammy Wilson, who led the rescue mission, said it was a risky one. That's why, despite past attempts by others, the sheep had been stuck for so long.

The sheep was first discovered in 2021, on the shore of the cliff in Brora by kayaker Jillian Turner. Photos show the sheep at the base of the cliff surrounded by steep rock on one side and water on the other.

In October of 2023 Turner said she has spotted the sheep several times since and the sheep hasn't been able to move off her spot on the base of the cliff. Turner said, “It is heart-rending. We honestly thought she might make her way back up that first year.”

Wilson, runs a Facebook page called "The Sheep Game" that chronicles his life as a farmer. After another farmer brought the sheep to his attention, he named the sheep Fiona and continued to give updates about her on Facebook.

Wilson then had an exciting update for followers. He and four others used a winch, a mechanical device that can act like a pulley, to get to Fiona. One person stayed at the top of the cliff, while the others traveled about 820 feet down the cliff to get to her.

In a statement, the Scottish SPCA said the group was notified of the rescue. Scottish SPCA said, "Our Inspector checked over the sheep and found her to be in good bodily condition, although needing sheared. The ownership of the sheep then was handed over to Dalscone Farm, a tourist attraction in Edinburgh with activities for children.

You can view pictures of the sheep and the cliff here.

In a recent segment on NPR’s Morning Edition, Rev. Cameron Partridge shared about an idea he developed during his years as a college chaplain. "You know, you've got the end of the semester. You've got finals. Preparation to leave for home. So, Advent barely got to be observed."

Traditionally, the season of Advent is observed in the Christian liturgical calendar during the four weeks preceding Christmas. But Partridge decided to start it a few weeks sooner, in order to draw attention to the necessary, urgent themes of the season. He says the shift gave students "an opportunity to actually really be present together and to observe it together, which could be grounding in a time of great intensity."

And this seems of upmost importance these days, especially given the current extended conflict in the Holy Land. "We can't pretend that everything is fine," he says. "There is tumult in the world, and it is real and it is hard and it is deeply affecting people."

The current move to begin marking the season earlier began in 2005, when the Rev. William Petersen got together a group of clergy, professors, and church musicians who formed something that came to be called the Advent Project.

Petersen believes that Advent for Christians is as much about hope for the Second Coming of Jesus—sometimes called the Second Advent—that will usher in the reign of God as much as it is about commemorating the first coming of God in the person of Jesus in first-century Palestine.

Petersen says that tension is where we all reside, which is why Advent is what we need. "In its dwelling in the already and the not-yet, Advent can ground and strengthen us in all of that uncertainty and help give us an ability to connect."

Possible Preaching Angle:

The good news is not just that God came to the earth as a baby, but that by doing so, he signaled hope for his Second Advent in which the heartache, injustice, and death of our fallen world will be overcome by goodness, truth, and life.

In today's highly politicized media climate, various opinions surround several ongoing conflicts. These conflicts include the ongoing war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas. Amidst these tensions, New York Times columnist Catherine Pearson offers tips for navigating holiday gatherings.

Pearson's advice aims to help individuals maintain composure and connection during challenging times. These tips were curated from hundreds submitted by readers who were asked to contribute their own best practices in avoiding family drama.

“Control the setting,” suggested one reader in Georgia. “We host, every year, every holiday … It has been easier to be where we can control the environment and where we have a safe space.”

“Find a connection,” suggested another reader in Arizona, who cited a mutual love of music that draws two brothers together during the holidays, despite very different political views. “We brought our guitars to the gathering … when we’re singing, we can’t fight.”

“When in doubt, talk sports,” says a reader from Florida, whose family has an unofficial list of topics to avoid in order to keep the peace. “When issues arise, we enjoy the old fallback: ‘How about those Mets?’”

There were even helpful responses in the comment section. One commenter suggests putting out markers and construction paper and having everyone decorate their own placemat. Apparently giving everyone a project can help cut down on arguments.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As we gather with our families and as our broader church family, let's not allow our differences to keep us from loving one another and treating each other with respect.