Your web browser is out of date

Note: parts of this website may not work properly for you. Update your browser for better speed, security, and experience.

Update browser Ignore
Your user account is not associated with an active church account.

Please contact us.

Contact Us Ignore

Your Most Important Christmas Ministry

Dec 7, 2020 · 6 min

For many church leaders, life reaches a fever pitch during the holiday season. You’re probably concerned about making budgets, preparing end-of-year reports, planning the best Christmas Eve service possible—and doing it all with the ongoing challenges of a pandemic. With all of the December activity it can be easy to forget one group: your family.

While the Christmas season usually means you are getting busier, your family is often winding down with work and school. For you, the Christmas season may be one of the busiest of the year, but your family sees the season as window of opportunity to slow down, make memories, and enjoy being together. This dichotomy can be a perfect recipe for a holiday season that is a little less joyful than you’d hope.

Church leaders should not neglect their families in order to focus on the flock. Since managing your household is a prerequisite for the role (1 Timothy 3:4-5 and 3:12), leading your family should actually be job #1. But how do you manage that during the busy Christmas season?

Over my 20+ years in ministry, I, too, have sometimes been guilty of letting work rule my home during the holidays. Through that experience, I’ve found some simple ways to lead and love my family well during the Christmas season.

Be Intentional During the Small Moments

Feel like you don’t have the time to do anything big with your family? Then focus on the small things, and be intentional with the time you do have together. Have Christmas-themed dinners or desserts throughout the month. Read an Advent devotional during breakfast (you can borrow ours). Play (or sing) Christmas carols together in the car. These small things can add up to a fun Christmas season, and they don’t take additional time out of your day.

Be Proactive With Calendars

My wife and I find that—especially as our kids get older—we need to proactively plan time for our family to be together. Before our calendar gets full with Christmas and church events, we block off dates during the holiday season. We schedule evenings for my wife and I to go out on a date, for one-on-one time with each of our kids, or for our family to just be together. Carving out time with your family—even to the point of saying “No” to other good things—ultimately communicates that you value and prioritize them.

If calendars just can’t seem to align before Christmas, think about leveraging the last week of the year. Many church leaders may not be able to spend multiple nights a week drinking cider and making cookies with the kids during the busy Advent season. However, things tend to slow down December 26. Some of your best activities and creative planning can happen the week after Christmas.

Create Unique Family Traditions

With a little thought and creativity you can come up with out-of-the-box traditions that are unique to your family. For me, many of these traditions are the things we do in the down time between Christmas and New Year’s. Some real-world examples of things we’ve done:

  • One of our family favorites is to go to the mall, split into groups of guys and girls, and create a scavenger hunt for the other group. Each group buys a gift, hides it in the mall, and texts the other group with clues on how find it. For instance, the gift might be hidden inside a locker by the ice skating rink, and the key to the locker taped to the back of an ornament on the big Christmas tree at the center of the mall.
  • One year, I bought a massive 6,000-piece LEGO set of the Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter. We spent the whole day after Christmas putting it together while watching the movies and having Harry Potter-themed snacks. Although it is kind of expensive, I was able to resell the set later online and recoup almost everything I spent on it.
  • Every year, for more than a decade, we’ve gone to one particularly well-decorated part of town and looked at Christmas lights together. At this point, it’s only a little bit about seeing the lights and a lot about the memories we have made.
  • We will sometimes cook meals from a specific country—like a Chinese or a Mexican Christmas feast. It is meaningful because it is something we normally wouldn’t do (or wouldn’t have time to do), and because it gets us all in the kitchen together.
  • For my family, Christmas isn’t complete until we’ve played our annual game of Risk, with the world-conquering victor writing their name down in the box lid so we have a record of who won each year.

Feel free to copy these ideas; you don’t even have to tell anyone that you didn’t come up with it yourself. Better yet, come up with something that fits your family and your personalities. Having unique traditions help create shared memories and keep your family feeling connected during a season that tends to make you feel scattered.

God’s church deserves your creative leadership during the Christmas season. Your family desires and deserves the same. It’s my prayer that these three ideas can help you serve and lead your family well this Christmas.

About The Author

John McGee

John McGee

John serves as the Senior Director of Watermark Resources at Watermark Community Church.

Learn more about John here on his biography page.