WHEN A CHILD IS BORN

Years ago I was appointed by the bishop to a small church in the Pine Barrens. It was a historic old church across the road from the Smithville Inn, a grand old restaurant that once was an 18th century stagecoach stop.  The congregation was small when I went there (8 people in the pews on my first Sunday, and one of them was asleep), but we managed to get attendance up to 75 eventually due to a new development taking place in the area.

However it was a slow crawl to get there making progress. In December I decided to hold a Christmas Eve service, which is something they never had had before. The church leaders were a bit skeptical, but I convinced them that we should give it a try. They agreed to that and even got excited and got busy decorating the sanctuary. A group of men managed to get a huge Christmas tree from one of the local Christmas tree farms—probably 15-20 feet high. 

On the morning of Christmas Eve, I went to the grocery store and bought some paper bags and small candles to put some luminaries along the walkway up to the church front door. No one had ever seen them before, and as various people drove by the church, they would roll down their car windows and ask, “What are you doing?!” My answer was, “You’ll see tonight. Make sure you come to the service at 7:30.” 

When the people started to arrive, a few of the church members helped me light the  luminaries once they saw what I was doing. It looked beautiful outside that old church, if I do say so myself. The atmosphere inside was almost in grand Victorian style with the wains coating walls and ceiling, lovely new chandeliers which we had purchased several months before and the candlelight along the aisles. 

The  congregation was thrilled to see their old church packed with people like never before, people singing Christmas carols at the top of their lungs. I remember preaching a sermon I titled “When a Child Is Born,” inspired by a song of the same name. I actually sang that song with my guitar in the service and invited the congregation to sing along with me. All of this by candlelight!

We didn’t have a Christmas Day service, but we didn’t need to because people were filled with the season’s spirit enough to have a truly joyous day of family time and feasting around their table. I know that because the next Sunday, people were still talking about the Christmas Eve service and the feelings they had when they saw how lovely and full their church was. As for me, I felt that a child had been anew in all of our hearts that night.

As a result of that service, we added some new worshippers, including the manager of the Harlem Globetrotters, for whom I later did a wedding. And some of our new people, formed a small choir that sang almost every Sunday.