Christmas Eve and a message from the Pastor

A Message From the Pastor

Christmas Eve Live 8:00 pm Thursday, December 24

While we have a long way to go, what a burst of hopeful energy has come to us with the release of the vaccines. Our exhausted medical and frontline workers across the country will have some relief soon and be able to bear their tasks better. Meanwhile, as we await the vaccines to get to the rest of us, our patriotic and Christian responsibilities both ask us to continue to do all we can to help. This led us to make the changes in the schedule we announced to you in an email. Permit me to tell you a little more about the committee’s thinking.

On Tuesday our staff and leaders convened to discuss how to respond to the spiking numbers in Jefferson County. Our church has done very well in being safe. Morning worship has worked very well as you noted so we felt we could get through one more Sunday safely. Since Thanksgiving week the numbers have gone up in our community at an alarming rate. We have church members and their families who have been affected. Our members in the healthcare and caregiving community have sounded an alarm—hospitals are full to the point of only taking on the most seriously ill.

Christmas Eve presented a lot of anxieties for us, not the least of which is families coming in from out of town, students back home from colleges, and long time members who show up to that service unannounced. Probably our greatest challenge was in thinking about how we kept people safe coming in and going out to that service which is not like the Sunday morning service. We were not at all certain that we could even control the numbers coming in.

As we talked further, we thought it might be wise if we returned to online only through the Christmas break and into early January until we can see if the spike calms down.  Many other congregations, including Dawson Memorial Baptist and Independent Presbyterian, have done the same.  We hope that putting a safe buffer in place now will help us return to in-person worship more quickly in the near future. Since the two Sundays after Christmas are traditionally very low we felt that it would be easier to put that buffer into place while we assess more carefully the situation in our community. Independent Presbyterian and Dawson have both made similar moves.

So at this point, we want to keep everybody safe over this holiday and hopefully see some light soon.  Our goal is to return to in-person worship as soon as it is safely possible.

With regards to Christmas Eve, the hardest part about it is the feeling of us all being together. This is my personal favorite service of the entire year (along with Easter Sunday, of course).  Now that we have successfully put in our own video equipment, I proposed that we have a service that is visually and musically as much like what we normally experience through the years. It will look and sound like the traditional service we’ve always done.  I also thought about the idea of doing it live rather than having a recorded service.  Even if we are apart, we will be observing communion simultaneously in homes, gathered together. It is very important to me to do it this way as an act of solidarity and worship together. Wherever you are on Christmas Eve, let’s be together amid familiar sights and sounds at the Lord’s Table.

Had we done it in-person, we would have been piecemeal—a small fragment of our church in-person and the rest at home online. This way, we worship together. You will have the opportunity to pick up prepackaged communion kits.

I wanted to share this with you to help you understand the process that brought us to a change in plan. Like you, the unpredictability is tiring, but because of the numbers out there and the impact we’re seeing among our own people, and with the difficulty in controlling the safety of Christmas Eve when large numbers may be gathered in homes, this seemed like the wise course of action.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. But I hope you hear this: it is more important that we have the largest participation in this service we have ever had on Christmas Eve. Attending together online will be an act of faith and commitment to Christ and our love for one another in this congregation.  See you next Thursday evening at 8 pm.  Prepare communion elements or pick them up this week, and have candles (the safe battery-operated kind will be just fine!). We will light candles together and sing “Silent Night” at the end as we always do, and Collins McMurray will sing, “Still, Still, Still,” our traditional ending. It will be a special time.

Gary Furr