Missio Dei Suburbia: Advent Conspiracy, Week One

This year, Christ Church has joined Advent Conspiracy, an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through compassion, not consumption. You can read more about AC here.

In conjunction with our hope that the days leading up to Christmas become a time where we worship more, spend less, give more, and love all - The Oconee Leader is running a series of articles written by me in an effort to see Christmas become something different in Oconee County.

Here's the first article:

Last week, my son turned three and we invited some of his friends over to celebrate his birthday. There was food and balloons and lots of laughing. People brought gifts – not for each other but for Jonathan.

As we enter into this season of Advent, a four-week long period of expectation and waiting and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, I’m wondering why we’re so hung up on giving gifts to each other when it’s his birth that we’re celebrating.

Americans will spend around $475 billion – just over $900 per person - on gifts, decorations and parties that will become forgotten memories or gather dust in a closet within months. We will run ourselves into the ground with all the shopping and obligatory office parties and the travel. And some of us who will bankroll Christmas with credit cards will be paying for Christmas well into 2008.

Is this the scandal that Jesus brought with him 2,000 years ago? Did Jesus intend for Black Friday to become the symbol of his birth? What would it look like for Jesus to turn Christmas upside down the way he turned the entire world on its head when he came carrying the blueprints of a conspiracy of love he calls his kingdom?

These are questions I’ve been haggled by for years as I watch what Christmas has become to you and me. We roll out clichés about Jesus being ‘the reason for the season’ but I doubt Jesus is particularly interested in being the driving force behind such a self-interested enterprise. I’m wondering if Jesus isn’t calling us to a radical new direction as we prepare for Christmas this year – a complete re-wiring of the scandal of Jesus’ birth as we resist consumerism and begin to give gifts like God does.

And here’s what I’ve noticed about the agenda of God’s gift-giving: it is focused primarily on relationships and is intended to further his mission of putting broken people and a broken world back together. God’s greatest gift is a relationship with himself and our relationship with him is not designed to terminate on us but to further his work of making all things new.

With that in mind, I want to encourage and even challenge other churches and followers of Jesus in Oconee County to join Christ Community Church in the Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), an international movement of over 500 churches and nearly 2,000 individuals to spend less on Christmas, give relational gifts and to donate the money saved to those in need around the world. Our particular focus is on the global need for clean water – while we are concerned with a very real drought here in our area, there are over one billion people around the world who don’t even have access to clean water. 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarhhea and 3,900 children die every day from water-born diseases. This is a horrific situation – but one that is not impossible to solve – the United Nations Development Program estimates that $10 billion a year would help solve the shortage of clean water. $10 billion will buy a lot of Christmas cookies, but think of it this way: if all of the 30,000 people living in Oconee County were to give $100 to this effort, that would contribute $3 million to alleviating a treatable problem. Just from our little county alone.

So we’re asking you to join us in giving at least 25 percent of the money you save by giving differently to each other this Christmas to the work of Living Water International (www.water.cc), an organization that provides both clean water and medical attention, as well as the ‘living water’ of the gospel of Jesus Christ to satisfy the deepest thirst of all peoples. LWI is doing some fantastic work by teaching people how to dig and repair shallow wells as well as basics of good health and hygiene. There are other outstanding groups that are furthering the love of Christ through providing resources for clean water – if you know of one and want to give through them, please do so. No money comes through our church or the Advent Conspiracy.

We’re not asking you to give more money – just to redirect where the money you were planning on spending goes this Christmas. We’re not asking for you to eliminate giving gifts to family and friends – just to become more concerned with giving the gifts of unhurried time and attention.

The Advent Conspiracy – Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All. An impossible dream made possible by the birth of One who would later die to set us free from the little kingdoms that are no larger than the size and scope of our own lives