Christmas - a great opportunity?

There's no avoiding it now, is there? Christmas really is approaching fast. I've been pondering Christmas over the last few weeks, and this often repeated assertion that Christmas represents a great evangelistic opportunity for us as churches, as people are somehow more open to think about Jesus at this time of year.

And I think my response is "yes and no". My initial response was "No", I have to say. In fact I remember saying at a joint churches' prayer meeting last month that for a lot of people their exposure to church and Jesus at Christmas is their spiritual equivalent of the annual flu jab - they'll put up with the discomfort of it then in order to avoid any more prolonged exposure for the rest of the year. But I'm beginning to wonder if that wasn't a little harsh. The fact is people are willing, for whatever reason, to go along to church services at Christmas. They may not be going with a great deal of spiritual openness or searching, but they are there. And that is an opportunity; maybe not on the whole, an opportunity to see them make commitments to Jesus, sadly. But certainly an opportunity to gently alter some of their preconceptions of what church is all about, of what Jesus' mission was all about.

So maybe, on balance, Christmas is a great opportunity, but not so much for evangelism but for pre-evangelism. Or maybe I'm just playing with words.