Evangelicals keep Christ in Christmas...except on Christmas Day?

Our Baptist church has Christmas Eve service and a short service at 10 a.m. Sunday. Our guess is the Sunday service will be lightly attended. Makes sense. Kids will be excited to open and play with toys; leaving in the midst of that messes up the day.
"What did you get, Johnny? Cool. Now put that down, grab your coat and go out to the car."
A lot of our friends from church are up in the air about attending Sunday for that reason. It's not about being bad Christians or anything along those lines.

 

The Catholic Church also counts as a full member anyone and everyone who ever wanders through their doors.

About 9-10 years ago, my civil divorce was finalized. I went to one of the local parishes to look into the procedures to get the marriage annulled from the RCC standpoint (just in case). In order to do so I had to give them my name, address, etc etc.

After a couple of weeks of looking into it, I concluded the process was going to be a massive pain in the butt for a lot of people, including my ex, who would have to travel back across several states in order to give testimony on the matter, plus a lot of other people whose opinion doesn't mean a goddamn thing were going to be drawn into it, PLUS it was going to cost a shitload of money, so I said the hell with it (plus I was not in real imminent danger of it being directly relevant anyway). Plus I have a lot of other problems with the RCC as I've detailed elsewhere.

Since then I haven't set foot back in the parish (the three or four times a year I go to mass, it's almost always at my old childhood parish when I visit my siblings). I still get a box of collection envelopes every couple months, though, so obviously they still consider me a parishioner. Never sent them a dime.

I suspect a huge huge number of the people who are "officially" counted as Catholic are in similar situations.

It's like bowl game attendance.

 

So they tarp over the pews?

 

He said bowl game, not Jags game.

 

I usually use the public opinion surveys that ask people what religion they consider themselves. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is probably the most comprehensive survey of the religious landscape. Out of 35,000 American adults, 23.9% described themselves as Catholic. Evangelical Christian denominations had 26.3%, and mainline Protestant denominations had 18.1%.

http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations

 

I'm United Church of Christ, which means membership actually runs things. Our pastor, given her druthers, would rather not have a Sunday service. There will be barely anyone there. However, the seniors clamored for it, and so the pastor will be there.

Re counting as Catholics: we withdrew from the church three years ago. I don't know if our former parish counts us as members, but they have faithfully mailed us collection envelopes without fail ever since.

 

A lot of Catholic churches have midnight masses, with "midnight" being 10 p.m.

 

Yeah, I've been in churches where they do exactly that -- if they know there aren't going to be more than 25 people at a mass, they use curtains or huge folding doors to block off large sections of the pews so they can cut down on heating bills.

 

Our church has, in the past, done two 12/24 services, one early evening for families and one lightly-attended late evening for the folks that are into the midnight stuff. This year, we dumped the late service so the pastor and whatever volunteers are helping don't have to make the quick turnaround from late service to our 10 a.m. Sunday service.

The pastor will be there on 12/25, which is relatively unusual, actually. One of the problems of religion in the U.P. is that many pastors are from the Lower Peninsula and get assigned up here, which means many of them get on the first flight south Christmas morning to be with family. If it were Christmas on the 26th, there'd be a lot of backups in the pulpit.

Because so many regulars will be out of town, it's a very stripped-down service Sunday (My pastor wryly observed earlier this month that on Christmas, you get 40 percent more visitors and have to work with 40 percent less help.) But to not have anything for the faithful on 12/25 is just lazy to me. Wherever two or three are gathered, there God is, right?

 

Our little Episcopal church (less than 50 members) is having a service this a.m., as we do every Christmas, whether it's a Sunday or not.

I truly don't understand the rationale for not having services on one of the high feast days. As I see it, churches that do that are conceding the secular Christmas traditions are more important now than the church calendar.

 

Observe Festivus and this would not be an issue. Airing of Grievances could happen Saturday or Sunday.

This has been a crossthread. Thank you for your time.

 

Our Christmas morning service was really lovely and very informal. In fact, they served mulled cider and cookies after my solo.