Churches in midst of prepping for Christmas

In the next two days, more than half of Wichitans will flock to area churches for Christmas services.

And depending on where they go, they’ll experience the sounds of special music, the sights of beautifully decorated sanctuaries, the smell of incense, the taste of special treats and/or the warmth of hundreds of candles held aloft in celebration.

But what they may not recognize is that hourlong experience in church has taken many more hours of preparation.

There’s an old saying in the military: Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.

And that could just as easily be applied to putting on a Christmas service – the logistical nightmare on the church calendar.

There are supplies to be obtained and distributed, special sermons to be written and practiced, musicians to be hired and rehearsed, children to be costumed and corralled and elaborate decorations to be unpacked and carefully set up.

Almost all churches put a lot of extra effort into Christmas – one of the two days a year, along with Easter, when the seats are packed with those who aren’t among the regular congregants.

A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center for religion and public life found that 92 percent of Americans – Christian and non-Christian – celebrate the Christmas holiday in some fashion.

Of those, 51 percent said they see it as primarily a religious celebration, while 32 percent said they think it’s more of a cultural holiday.

Eighty-six percent said they plan to gather with extended family or friends and/or buy gifts for friends or family, ranking those activities highest among Christmas observances. Seventy-nine percent said they put up a Christmas tree.

Fifty-four percent said they’d be attending church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. That number is likely higher in Wichita.

Unlike Easter, which always falls on a Sunday, Christmas comes on a different day of the week each year, making it a moving target.

Many pastors say that a Friday Christmas, as this year’s is, is especially challenging because it means a quick turnaround to regularly scheduled services on Saturday and Sunday.

The Rev. Mark Calhoun, a former Wichita minister and skiing fanatic who is now a pastor at a United Methodist church in Wyoming, posted on Facebook Tuesday that the ski area up the mountain was getting 15 inches of new snow for the holidays.

“No thanks,” he wrote. “I’ll just stay put and work 90 hours over the next 3 days ... you all go ahead and tear up the fresh 15.”

But tongue-in-cheek lamentations over missed powder snow aside, pastors will tell you that the extra work involved in putting on special Christmas services is well worth the trouble.

“I feel like it’s one of the times where people are really receptive to the idea of hope and joy and love that come through that relationship with Jesus,” said the Rev. Manny Garcia, lead pastor at Northridge Friends Church. “We really just kind of pull out all the stops, because we want people to know that we’re a church that really cares about our neighborhood and we really want to take advantage of the opportunity we have with them, even if it’s only for a short time.”

Northridge Friends will have a single 7 p.m. Christmas Eve service, about 90 percent music, built around musicians performing songs from “Behold the Lamb of God,” an album by contemporary Christian musician Andrew Peterson that traces the Bible from the beginning through the birth of Jesus.

It’s a tradition going back, well, more than 11 months.

“This is the second time that the church has done it,” said Garcia, who came to Northridge Friends earlier this year. “They were so excited about it, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it, see what it looks like.’ They got a really good response from it last year, so we’re excited to do it again.”

At the other end of the spectrum from the small single-Christmas-service church lies St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church – “2,700 families, 8,500 souls,” according to the Rev. Jarrod Lies, the parish priest.

From Thursday through Sunday, St. Francis Church will be celebrating 13 Christmas and regular Masses.

The Christmas Eve-through-Christmas Day Mass schedule looks like this: 5 p.m., 7 p.m., midnight, 8:30 a.m., 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

And, because New Year’s is also a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics, the celebration of Mary as the mother of God, they’ll do it all again next week, except for the midnight Mass.

“We hear thousands of confessions in these days as well,” Lies said. “If you started last Monday to today, if we’ve heard less than 1,500 confessions, I’d be surprised.

“It’s been pretty awesome, actually pretty humbling to serve that way.”

So when do you actually sleep, Father Jarrod?

“Yeah, good question, huh?” he said with a laugh.

The church has three priests, two who live there and one who comes in on weekends.

“We divvy up the Masses between the three of us … so ideally, none of us should ever have to say more than two Masses in a given day,” he said.

Lies said he sees the Christmas services as sort of a counterweight to a popular culture view of the holiday.

“You hear this in all of the different movies: ‘the true meaning of Christmas,’ which oftentimes boils down to sharing or acts of charity, which is definitely true, I don’t want to deny that at all,” he said. “But that’s the second of two Great Commandments … the first Great Commandment is to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength, and that’s Jesus Christ, so the true meaning of Christmas is that God became man so that we might be able to be entered into God’s life forever.”

And if it takes extra effort to spread that message at Christmas, so be it, he said.

“We’ve actually been preparing for this (round of services) for a couple of months, at least,” he said.

But if you’re one of those people who enjoys the flurry of last-minute Christmas preparations, it’s hard to beat the Episcopal Church.

For historical and doctrinal reasons, the celebration of the Christmas season doesn’t begin in the Episcopal Church until Christmas Eve, said the Rev. Dawn Frankfurt, rector at St. James Episcopal Church.

“That means we haven’t been singing Christmas carols or having any Christmas decorations in the church or anything,” Frankfurt said.

To get ready for the Christmas services, church members gathered Monday evening for their annual Greening of the Church, when they decorate with pine boughs and wreathes and set up the nativity scene.

“We play Christmas music, and they have a bunch of goodies to eat and stuff like that,” she said. “It’s chores, getting the church ready for Christmas – and sort of a little pre-party.”

St. James has three services on Christmas Eve – 4, 7 and 10 p.m. – and, unlike many Protestant churches, also has a service Christmas morning at 10.

But despite all the preparation that goes into Christmas services, sometimes the most memorable Christmas moments come when the service goes off script.

Like the Episcopal incense incident that Frankfurt tells of.

Episcopalians traditionally burn incense in their Christmas services, the smoke symbolizing prayers rising to heaven, she explained. St. James will have incense at all its Christmas services except 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, which is incense-free to accommodate those with allergies.

But the church she served before St. James had a particularly sensitive security system.

“One year, we forgot to let the monitoring service know that, by the way, it’s Christmas and we’re doing incense and there will be a lot of smoke in the church,” she recalled. “So naturally the fire alarm went off and the fire department shows up to put out the fire in the middle of the Christmas Eve service. So you’ve got to plan ahead about the fact that you are going to have smoke in church.”

Then there was the time two years ago when Lies, as part of his Christmas homily, decided it would be fun to sing songs from the Disney animated movie “Frozen.”

That film was such a hit with a certain age demographic that parents who had young children at the time were being driven crazy by their kids watching and re-watching the movie, memorizing the songs and singing them over and over and over.

So when Lies did that at the Christmas Mass, “The kids were just floored that a priest was singing ‘Frozen’ songs,” he said.

“And one of the kids looks at his mom and goes: ‘Is he talkin’ to me?’ ”

This story was originally published December 23, 2015 at 9:14 AM with the headline "Churches in midst of prepping for Christmas."