You can’t skip Church

The “skip church” billboard is part of a clever atheistic campaign targeted toward the Bible belt, including Nashville, Tenn., where I live.

It is curious to me that a letter supposedly written by a child “too old for fairy tales” is addressed to Santa Claus.  I’m sure those behind the campaign know that Santa is a fictional character and that letters addressed to him are not processed by elves but by a special effort of the United Postal Service.

But the real message I’d like to send to the folks behind the billboard is this: “You can’t skip church this Christmas because the Church is distributed in the world that God so loves.”

Sure, you can skip the service for the hanging of the greens, the lighting of the Advent candles, the Christmas carol sing-a-long, the live nativity play, the living Christmas tree performance and even the Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols. But you cannot skip church. Why not? Because church is not a building and church is not an event. Church is a people and we cannot be skipped, especially at Christmas.

God has seen fit to distribute His Church like proverbial seed scattered throughout the highways, byways, rocky places, thistle patches, suburbs, slums, waiting rooms and coffee shops of your everyday life. You can’t skip us and we are commissioned to intentionally not skip you.

I genuinely wish you a Merry Christmas not as affront to your faithlessness but as a testimony and witness to the joy of the in-breaking reality of God I celebrate this time of year.