Word: willow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 1994. Leaders at Willow Creek Community Church, a congregation in the affluent Chicago suburbs where about 15,000 people worship each weekend, said that attendance wasn't great. This year, they decided to try "an experiment in decentralizing the congregation on Christmas morning," says senior pastor Bill Hybels. If you want to sing some carols and share the Christmas peace at Willow Creek on Dec. 25, you'll have to do it alone, out in the church parking lot. "In our community, people-particularly seekers who may not normally attend church...
...Willow Creek is not the only church that won't open. Across the country, hundreds of congregations like Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex., Discovery Church in Orlando, Fla., and Granger Community Church in Granger, Ind., have decided that it's not worth it to marshal the resources to hold services on Christmas Sunday. Sunday School teachers get a break, as do ushers, the choir, the musicians and, of course, the pastors...
...These congregations have not canceled Christmas. Willow Creek will have eight services in the five days before Christmas Sunday, with up to 60,000 expected to attend. According to Hybels, worshipers at those services will receive DVDs, which they will be encouraged to watch on Christmas Day with their families. The message: "God is with us everywhere...
...Haggard, who is also pastor of the 11,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., says his church "would never not have church on a Sunday. Christians have been doing it for 2,000 years." At the same time, he says, Willow Creek is showing the creativity and innovation for which it and Hybels have long been known. "Willow Creek is communicating that we're in an era when the church meets in a variety of ways," Haggard says. "This is what makes American Evangelicalism so great. We're so diverse. The meaning of Christmas is more important...
...Others worry that the fight may be more damaging than any impact from what they're fighting about. ""The central point is not what hour of what day the congregation gathers corporately to celebrate the birth of Christ," says Willow Creek's Hybels, "but rather that in our hearts and lives we allow the coming of Christ to transform us." On his blog, Louie Marsh, pastor of a small church in rural Arizona, quoted the Apostle Paul from the Book of Romans, who wrote, "Who are you to judge someone else's servant?" "I do know [that] this...