The Vine that Strangled Christmas

This is a really unusual post for me. First it is being composed in the evening on a weekend. Second I normally avoid speaking of groups, people or organization by name unless they are politicians. Third, when I write about religion I try to write about personal themes. Tonight I am writing about an identifiable group.

The really smart, pretty, looks twenty-five years younger than she is wife and I have been looking for a new church for the past couple of months for a variety of reasons. For a city with a fairly large number of prominent churches this has been harder than you might think. Part of that process took us to the Christmas pageant presented by "The Vine" in the HKCEC theatre 2.

This was one church that we can scratch off our list.

I can sum up the rest of this post in three words when I say that this Christmas pageant was: offensive, sacrilegious, and blasphemous.

I walked out after about 15 minutes but the wife, our daughter and her non-Christian boyfriend stayed for the whole performance in part because my wife and daughter didn't want to climb over the seats in the last row like I did to get out.

I can honestly say that they had a very good video presentation of the church announcements. I cannot recommend anything else about their service. If this was indicative of the theology that is commonly believed in their church I really wonder about that congregation's salvation.

They had disco dancing angels, God played by an overweight woman, idiotic angels. They made fun of the way God chose Mary and Joseph. They made fun not of Christians as fallen beings but of the invisible church eternal, the nature of God and displayed a shocking lack knowledge of basic Christian doctrine. Those were just the things I saw in 15 minutes or so. My wife told me that they basically disparaged and denigrated the entire Christmas story and that after I left it got worse. I went out side the theatre and sat on a couch not knowing whether to be angry or sad over a church that would do something like this.

Blasphemy is the sin of demeaning the nature of God. This program did that at almost every opportunity tonight. That is a horrible thing to say but I can find no other words.

The non-Christian boyfriend told me that his Anglican relatives would have walked out as well. Then he made another comment that I found profound. He said: "This looked like a spoof of the Christmas story that anti-Christians would have staged to make fun of Christians." Wow! How is that for a comment from an unbeliever. He was on the other hand almost amused by the event which in this case, isn't good.

We brought him to this service as an evangelistic opportunity. I'd hoped that he would see the wonder and awe inherent in the Christmas story. What he saw was poor almost beyond belief.

Great job guys! you're doing the devil's work better than he could himself.


Until Next Time
Fai Mao
The Blogger who is still trying to celebrate Christmas.