Thinking Ahead

I have one week's holiday this week which gives me a little more time to recover from my recent operation and, at the same time, an opportunity to get some of my Advent programmes for the church a little further on.

This is one time of the year when ministers and pastors, and priests and vicars --- in fact church leaders of all shapes and sizes --- are so busy planning the various Advent programme. Mind you, for some it's made easier by the fact that there are certain things that people like to remain the same, year after year. Things like this are labelled 'Tradition'. But is tradition always a good thing? Is there not a chance that the familiarity of the event in question will prevent people from really taking the message to heart? It's a difficult thing to do, but sometimes tradition has to be massaged a little, adding something new to the old in order to make people sit up and take notice.

Just imagine if we never did that! Why, the little girl who played the fairy in the Christmas Pageant and looked so cute when she was a when 5-year-old would not look quite so cute forty years down the line!

One of the things that I love about the Nativity narrative is that even though it's probably the oldest story that most of us remember, and of course goes back a little more than two thousand years, nevertheless there is always the opportunity for a new approach to the way that it's done. So we see a wide variety of styles which vary from the simplest approach by many Sunday Schools as they act the timeless story out in the Sunday Service, to the adventurous approach of taking the whole thing outside, using real animals gathered around a real manger. Some will even use a real baby.

The important thing is not the style of the nativity play but the sincerity with which it's performed and the Scriptural accuracy given to the whole event. In my Bible, which obviously differs from many a School Bible, there is no mention of Batman, Spiderman or the Ninja Turtles, when it comes to the Nativity story, yet all of these have featured somewhere in previous years ---and a lot of other characters too!

The problem for me is quite simple in all of this. You see, I believe the account in the Bible is an accurate record of the birth of our Lord, not simply a nice story, and so as soon as you start to add fictional characters to the Nativity play then it creates confusion in the minds of the children who fail to differentiate between the historical characters and facts, and the fantasy characters and fiction.

So I guess the whole issue comes down to this. Tell your children what the Bible says about our Lord's birth without adding to it. It's a beautiful and simple story as it is! As for Batman and Robin, well, of course they have their place in the storytelling world as well, but not as part of the record of Jesus' birth.

What do you think? Let me know!