Each month we will offer a list of action ideas so you can defend, honor, and celebrate Life in your churches and communities on our Take Action page. This month, we are looking at life ministry at Christmas.

Doesn’t it feel like Advent becomes shorter and shorter every year?  Between church events, choir concerts, family get togethers, gift shopping, holiday baking, as well as the hundreds of other traditions that we feel we must do, Christmas itself feels shoehorned into all the activities we are apparently doing to celebrate it!  I’m sure many of you feel this as well.

Which is why, after talking about how busy everything is,
the title of this article must seem laughable. 
Life ministry?  During Christmas?  With everything else you have going on?   You just don’t have time for one more thing
to be added to your already very busy schedule. 
And I’m sure that’s true.  You
don’t have time.  But that doesn’t mean
that we shouldn’t make time. 
Because our Heavenly Father did not send His Son into the world as a
baby so we could have a reason to decorate our houses, give gifts, have
parties, or set up cute little nativity scenes. 
He sent His Son to change the world—to transform a hard-hearted,
sin-beset people and make them His own through the death of that same Son and
the coming of the Holy Spirit.  And we as
the Church, these transformed people, should want to serve the unborn, elderly,
and vulnerable here on this earth, knowing that we bear with us the greatest
gift of all—salvation through Christ. 

So, yes, life ministry should be an integral part of all our Christmas traditions.  Because once you strip away the lights, the tinsel, the food, the wrapping paper, and all the inconsequential nothings that Christmas has become to us, we are left with the Son of Man in a manager, who came to bring us Life.  May we serve, honor, and protect that gift even in this most busy of seasons.

Action Ideas

• Visit home-bound or hospitalized parishioners and sing hymns and carols and pray with them.
• Volunteer with your local pregnancy center to make gift baskets for moms and babies.
• Bring friends and neighbors without family to Christmas events at your church or to Christmas dinner.