What Do I Do If My Church Cancels Service for Christmas?

I'm basically making a statement by modifying my plan, like I'm making a statement to say that I'm scared of the statue and that I'm more scared of the statue than I am of God, Yahweh, right? And I think if I were to make a biblical case about it, I would make it along those lines.

Whether Churches Should Cancel Christmas Service

All right, Tim, the question for today's episode.

Is what do I do if my church cancels service on Christmas?

Yeah, I think if you're still going to the kind of church that is canceling service on Christmas that you've utterly failed at your church shopping adventures and you should really go think your standards.

For a church at this point.

You need to go look into the return policy.

That's right, yeah. So, I mean, basically, yeah, I don't know. I just can't imagine being at a place where it makes sense to the church leadership to close church on Christmas. And that's not just like adding some sort of new reason to leave a church.

I mean, I think a lot of people are looking for any reason possible to not be committed to a local church, to not be faithful to a local church. And there's a lot of people who post-COVID with some of those things have just never returned to church.

Solid people who are biblically faithful looking for a good church and those who are not faithful. So, I mean, some of this depends on just where you're at in the country and there's better churches and worse churches.

We've had people reach out to us and basically say, hey, we're looking for churches out there that had a good COVID response, so to speak, and we're not finding them, what do we do? So I think the reality is that one of the things we tell people in church membership process is there's a lot of people who are so afraid of committing to an unhealthy church that they basically just divorce themselves from church indefinitely out of some fear of connecting themselves to, if they're a lung, the body, like everyone's a body part in the church.

If they picture themselves as a lung, they're so afraid of attaching themselves to a smoker church that they just never join. And I would say that, well, it's better to join a smoker church than to be a lung laying on the ground, atrophying apart from circulatory system and all that.

So find a place to go, sure. But I think COVID really did, it should have taught us the character of certain churches. There's certain kinds of churches that will never find a good, they'll never find a reason insignificant enough to miss church, basically.

And I mean, those are the kind of churches that I think you should just not touch with a 10 foot pole. And unless you just have no other choice, if you have no other choice, then that's what you got. But you may be surprised if you look out there and see, but I'd wanna, at this point, if it's not obvious at this point, I don't know what will make it obvious.

I think you wanna be at a church that is basically saying, we're gonna be open when, we're gonna meet on the Lord's day as we're commanded to when the doors are open, and that's a non-negotiable, and come hell or high water, we're gonna meet.

And I don't know what you've learned from the past few years. If you haven't learned that, listen at the very least.

The Church as an Assembly and the Duty to Gather

You say like we're commanded. So you're implying that there is some sort of biblical case for, or at least it sounds like you're implying that there is some sort of biblical case for, hey, the churches that close down or the church members that make their peace with not being, or missing the Sunday gathering, they're in some kind of sin.

Is that what you're saying?

Well, yeah, definitely.

Okay, what makes you say that? Like biblically, where are you coming from there?

Yeah, well, the word church, a lot of people are basically committing the etymological fallacy as it relates to the word church. And so the word church is ekklesia, right? Ekk, so that's a compound word in the Greek, it's ekk, and then it's kaleo.

It's a certain conjugation of the verb kaleo. So people think ekk means like out of, and then kaleo means call. And so you put those two things together and you think, well, the church means called out, like the ones who are called out of.

And that's just engaging in the etymological fallacy in the same way that like a butterfly is not a fly that produces butter, okay? So like ekklesia in the Bible, it doesn't mean the called out ones. What it means is it means assembly.

So you can understand that it means assembly fairly easy if you just like, there's a, it's called a Greek version of the New Testament, or a Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. And if you look up ekklesia in the Septuagint, you know, most of the time, the vast majority of the time it, well, it's not the vast majority, it's like maybe 60 or something.

I may be getting like the percentages mixed up. It may be 60 -40 one way or the other, but most of the time it's kahal, which means to assemble. And then the other time it means eda, congregation. And then there's a few other minor variations.

But the point here is just to say the word ekklesia means assembly.

That's what it means.

And so if you understand what church means, church means assembly, okay? And that should radically change your nature of what you even understand the church to be. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Like the church is an assembly. And that's why, you know, first, that's why Hebrews 10 .25 or whatever it says, "'Not for neglecting to meet together is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.

All the more when you see the day drawing near that not neglecting to meet together, that's all one word, which is episynagogue, not neglecting to assemble together.". What the church is, it's assembly.

So the church in its nature, it's an assembly. It's a group of people who gather together on the Lord's day and, you know, put themselves under the teaching of their elders, right? The singing of Psalms, prayers, and spiritual songs.

Like the church is the church when we gather together because that's what we are, we're assembly. So a lot of people say like silly things like, you know, be the church, right? It's like, no, the church is an assembly.

You can't be in assembly, okay? Like, so, you know, when you think about what the word actually means, like it means assembly. We are to assemble. We're not to forsake the assembly of the saints. And, you know, the early church met on the Lord's day.

You know, John was in the spirit on the Lord's day. On the first day, and that was the first day of the week. On the first day of the week, we're instructed every week to lay aside something in order to give as we prosper.

So you read through the New Testament, the point there is to say there's an expectation that believers will attach themselves to a local body. They'll join that local body and they'll assemble together.

And if you are an individual who is neglecting to assemble together, the argument of Hebrews is that you are in danger of falling away from the faith. So much so that John, 1 John says they went out from us.

They went out from the assembly because they were not of us, but they left that it may be demonstrated that they're not of us. So the church is an assembly. That's what we do. We are commanded in the scripture to assemble on the Lord's day.

That's what we do. And, you know, this is not something that we just made up. The entire New Testament is a group of letters that are written to specific local churches, right? To the church of Ephesus, to church in Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Laodicea, whatever.

They're letters written to these churches, to the, you know, saints of God in Rome, right? Like to these churches. And so that's what we are. That's what we do. And any church that wants to come along and basically just in a cavalier way, lay that aside is basically just saying, they're making a statement of their priorities.

They're saying, you know, Santa Claus is more important than Jesus, essentially. So, I mean, it's a bizarre thing to think that you're going to celebrate Jesus's birthday by neglecting to worship him as he commands.

Moving the Service to the Evening and the Question of Priorities

What about a church, and I haven't heard of this. I'm just thinking, I was thinking about this just now. What about a church that says, hey, we're going to meet on Sunday, but instead of meeting in the morning, we're going to meet in the evening.

And this is a, keep in mind, this is a church that does not normally meet in the evening. They're specifically moving their morning service to the evening to accommodate Christmas being on a Sunday. Is that like the same kind of?

I don't have a airtight moral argument to say that that is inherently wrong because I don't know that there's a command about when you meet as a church in the Bible. But I would just say that I think that's a statement of priority that you're making, right?

Like, it still feels strange, right?

It should feel strange, right? So it should feel very strange to say that, like, as a statement of priority, you're saying that getting up with your family in order to open presents from Santa or whatever, I don't recommend that.

It's a statement of priority to say that the traditions that you've adopted, your Christmas rituals, that were supposed to be designed to celebrate Jesus are now trumping your church rituals, right? Like, that's a very weird and strange thing.

And I would say that I don't know how, so I don't think there's a case to be made biblically that that's absolutely sinful. I just don't trust the kind of person whose instincts are going to go that way at all, as far as I can throw them.

Daniel’s Testimony and Refusing to Hide Worship

Like, I would rather, you know, I would trust someone who, there's the only pastors I could think of that would be related to this is Daniel, the story of Daniel, okay? So when he's commanded to not, no longer pray to anyone but the statue that Nebuchadnezzar had set up, like, Daniel, his practice before that was to pray with the windows open facing Jerusalem, right?

So he did that, and then there was a command issued that you shall not pray to any other God but this statue, essentially. And the next day, Daniel, like, what he could have done was he could have closed his curtains, okay?

Yeah, he could have modified what he was doing.

He could have closed his, changed his habit, changed his practice, closed his curtains, moved, right, like, moved to a different location, whatever, he could have prayed, he could have done it at a different time to throw people off in order to cover, but he did, he didn't modify his plan.

You know, the very next day he went and he prayed with the windows open and was caught, you know, and thrown into a lion's den. But the thing is, like, he did that because he wanted, because he thought, like, his testimony was so important, right?

So he was concerned about the testimony of it. If I close my curtains as a coward, I'm, you know, in the language of the New Testament, I'm, like, hiding my light under a bushel, right?

Yeah.

I'm basically making a statement by modifying my plan. Like, I'm making a statement to say that this statue, like, I'm scared of this statue and that I'm more scared of the statue than I am of God, Yahweh, right?

And I think, you know, if I were to make a biblical case about it, I would make it along those lines. I would say that a similar kind of thing is happening to where the world, you know, as the SBC likes to say, the world is watching, right?

Yeah, yeah.

The world is watching, so are you gonna show them that you care more about your Christmas rituals that were supposed to be about God, or are you gonna show them that you care more about Yahweh, right, and I think worshiping Yahweh takes precedence every day.

Closing Exhortation and Podcast Sign-Off

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