January 2006

China Notes 15

Greetings!

If you were ever to have occasion to attend the Christmas celebrations at St Paul’s Church here in Nanjing, much would no doubt seem quite familiar to you—a Christmas Eve candlelight service, familiar carols, Gospel readings, and so forth. However, in other ways you might feel like you had stepped into an alternate universe. For example, if you appeared at the front gate of St. Paul’s fifteen minutes before the service, hoping to get a seat, you would be directed by helpful crowd-control officers to the end of a line stretching several blocks, where you might wait for a few hours in hopes of eventually getting into a service. Perhaps I should pause here and explain.

As is the case in much of the world, Christmas is becoming more popular in China as a secular commercial holiday. And as the holiday becomes more familiar, more people are aware that it has Christian origins and become curious about what those origins might be. So, many decide to drop in on a Christmas service at a church—especially on Christmas Eve—in order to find out more.

In some ways, this is actually a nuisance, especially for large and visible churches like St. Paul’s, which tends to attract lots of attention and very large crowds of the curious. So many outsiders drop in during the Christmas season that it is difficult for regular church members to find a seat. However, the church has chosen to look at this phenomenon less as a problem and more as an opportunity to give a large number of people a substantial taste of what the Christian faith is about.

• The church choir singing everything from Christmas carols like “What Child is This?” and “Oh Holy Night” to praise songs like “Give Thanks” to a rousing version of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”
• The youth choir singing songs like “Beautiful Blessing” (a Chinese hymn) while also signing them in Chinese sign language for the deaf.
• The fledgling choir from St. Paul’s English service using its newly acquired four-part harmony skills to provide rousing renditions of “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “I Love You Lord,” and “This is the Day.”
• Dancers from the church performing dances and Christian songs from China’s minority ethnic groups, as well as offering a visual interpretation of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”
• And, of course, the Christmas story from Luke, quite a few Christmas carols, and a rather longer sermon than you might expect from a Christmas Eve service at home.

All this is intended to maximize the number of people who choose to drop by. And it does precisely that. While I don’t know precisely how many people came to St. Paul’s over the Christmas weekend, it was at least several thousand. (The two thousand free New Testaments that the church prepared to hand out to visitors were all taken before the end of the first Christmas Eve service.) Of course, the church staff knew in advance that one Christmas Eve service would not be enough to accommodate such large crowds, so they scheduled an extra “Candlelight Christmas” service the evening before Christmas Eve, and a “Christmas Music Service” on the afternoon of Christmas Day. However, even the addition of these two extra services—both of which filled to capacity—did not bring the Christmas Eve crowd down to the point where everyone could find a seat. Even well after the first Christmas Eve service started, there was a line blocks long of people still waiting and hoping.

So, as the singers and dancers filed out of the church after the first service, one of the pastors ran up and asked if we would be willing to stay around and sing at a second add-on service after the first one was over. Needless to say, few of us would even think of turning down the opportunity to offer an encore service for a crowd that was willing to stand in line for hours in the winter cold.

And the point of all this? I’m not suggesting that churches everywhere should have Christmas Eve crowds like those at St. Paul’s—after all, it is lot easier to crowd a church on Christmas Eve in a country where church buildings are relatively scarce and where there is a large and curious population. However, I want to share this account with you because it is exciting during the Christmas season to be reminded not only that the good news has come into the world already, but that it continues to come into the world through Christ’s body on the earth, the church, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Merry Christmas!

Don and Wei Hong Snow

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 246