Thanks to all the staff and volunteers at each of the 10 churches for celebrating Jesus’ birth and making our Christmas all the merrier:

1. Harvest OC, Irvine
2. Eastside Christian Church, Fullerton
3. Friends Church, Yorba Linda
4. NewSong Church, Irvine
5. ROCKHARBOR, Costa Mesa
6. Saddleback Church, Lake Forest
7. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach
8. Mariners Church, Irvine
9. Kingsfield Church, Aliso Viejo
10. Coast Hills Church, Aliso Viejo

   
While I won’t name any one particular church service as a favorite or as the best, I will list these highlights and comments:

• Biggest Surprise: big-band-style concert band at Friends Church
• Most creative production: shadow-puppets retelling the Big Story at ROCKHARBOR (Journey of Joy video) [probably over 1,000 pieces cut-out & painted and every performance live!]
• Best Christmas gift: family portrait photo-shoot at Eastside Christian Church
• No more room in the inn (full-capacity crowds): Harvest OC, ROCKHARBOR, Saddleback Church, Mariners Church
• The more popular Christmas songs: Silent Night, Angels We Have Heard on High, Joy to the World, O Holy Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing
• Don’t recall hearing: Away in a Manger, O Come All Ye Faithful, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Deck the Halls, Jingle Bell Rock
• Most consistently-presented theme: Eastside Christian Church [paper-mache Christmas trees and paper snowball as physical prop for responding to sermon to "let go"]
• Most comfortable seating: Friends Church, Coast Hills Church
• Screen with the widest aspect-ratio: Kingsfield Church
• What we didn’t see: a Gospel Choir, Handel’s Messiah, Christmas musical cantata, live Nativity with live animals, drama/skit
• Quietest worship time: late-night 11pm worship in the chapel at Mariners Church (very cool to hear the chapel bells ring at midnight of Christmas)
• Best-dressed choir: St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (actually, the only choir we saw, and they sounded great!)
• Children singing: Eastside Christian Church, NewSong Church

And the memories that stay with me about the OC Christmas Tour 2011 and a few learnings about churches: Christmas has inspired people all walks of life, not just churches and those who follow Jesus, most obviously through the arts and movies. We love a wide variety of expressions of worship in different churches. Churches really do produce their best worship services for Christmas, and that takes a ton of planning, preparation, and volunteers. It takes a lot of planning of logistics to get from one church to the next — gotta tip your hat to itinerant speakers/preachers who travel a lot. I can sympathize with those who go to church for the first time (or rarely), and how being in a strange place not knowing where to go or what to do is quite daunting.

And, for us, you can never get too much of Christmas!

To make this Christmas Tour 2011 possible, I went researching and found 19 OC churches that had special Christmas worship services, starting as early as Wednesday 12/21 all the way through Sunday 12/25. Here’s the schedule charted out via Google Docs’ spreadsheet:

It’s not easy to fit in 11 worship services due to geography and scheduling overlaps. One itinerary to map out the tour:

1. Wed 7pm @ Saddleback Church, Lake Forest
2. Thurs 7pm @ Harvest OC, Irvine * Phil Wickham concert
3. Fri 3pm @ Eastside Christian Church, Fullerton [+ quick dinner]
4. Fri 7pm @ Seacoast Grace Church, Cypress
5. Sat 12pm @ ROCKHARBOR, Costa Mesa
6. Sat 1:30pm @ The Crossing, Costa Mesa [+ early dinner]
7. Sat 5pm @ Mariners Church, Irvine
8. Sat 7pm @ St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach
9. Sat 10:30pm @ Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove
10. Sun 9am @ Compass Bible Church, Aliso Viejo
11. Sun 11am @ Coast Hills Church, Aliso Viejo

How would you arrange an itinerary to visit 11 churches for Christmas in the OC?

I confess that I personally won’t be able to get to 11 churches during this Christmas week. I do prioritize family time and that’d include time to be with extended family. What I can do is report my tour stop in real-time via my twitter @djchuang . And note that the above list is an attempt to design a schedule to fit in 11 worship services, and it won’t be the itinerary of my whereabouts. Realistically, I think I can get to 6 or 7 this year – that’d be a great Christmas!

[photo credit: sister72, *clarity*, jeffweese, jdbradley]

For these holiday seasons, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s the mixed emotions of being with extended family members that many only see this one time of year. Then, there’s my lil’ online family too, those who connect with me and one another via blogging, twitter, facebook, skype, and tokbox. My life is so much richer for both on-line and off-line relationships. I enjoy them both so.

And, back by popular demand, here’s the Chuang Chess Christmas e-card for 2009! [PDF download] Thank you again for staying connected and I’m anticipating more connections, conversations, and opportunities in the new year with you, both on-line and on-site.

This video powered by Tokbox.com — it’s pronounced “talk”-”box”. Don’t mispronounce it like I did.

Jesus shows that being spiritual is being engaged in the real world. A real Christian faith is so much more than prayer, Bible reading, attending worship services. And, the Christmas story ought to bring peace and good will to all kinds of people.

Yet, only 7% of U.S. churches are racially diverse.[*]

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. [emphasis mine]

Social networks. The sociological factors that affect church life often go understated, often rationalized in theological constructs. Watch the entire interview from PBS Religion & Ethics:

[*] Religion and Ethics interview with Michael Emerson, author of People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States; researchers regard a “mixed” congregation as one with at least 20 percent of its members providing racial or ethnic diversity

Aside: for fans of The Office and/or those who can laugh at their own religions, watch the God, Inc. series over at YouTube; note the difference between “really Christian” and “sort of Christian”]

If your inbox resembles anything like mine, with lots of unread emails and Inbox Zero hasn’t become a habit yet, you’re probably receiving lots of emails with a PDF attachment (or Word .doc) of people’s annual Christmas newsletter. With rising costs of gasoline and postage stamps, this is the way things are going to be for a while.

Our version is less wordy and image-y this year. So to you and yours, a very Merry Christmas!

[update] with over 2,500 emails in my Gmail address book, there’s no way I can personally address each e-card to my friends and family. So this is my catch-all.

And, if you’re also tired of the consumerism of the season, join the Advent Conspiracy to restore the meaning of Christmas, its worship, compassion, joy, peace, and goodwill to all.

[AC] Advent Conspiracy from Jon Collins on Vimeo.

I’ve just finished sending out our Christmas cards (handmade e-cards) to friends and family. I scrolled through our haphazard address book in Gmail Contacts and bcc’d probably 200 or 300 people. Dozens of hard bounces, so have a lot of updating to do in the new year. The thing about Christmas e-cards is you can hang them with the other Christmas cards on the Christmas tree or along the mantle. But, you’re welcome to print it out.

As much as I’m into networking and relating across the country and a little around the world, I don’t have a good way to organize my contacts and emails. Time in California has been great so far, met up with lots of great people, including Aaron “thevoiz” Flores and Keith (of Keith and Dave and RenCom) Page. Meeting up with Ray Chang for lunch today. My son Jeremiah wants to come along to meet the pastor who dedicated him. Might even drop in on Rudy if he’s around.

Read the Chuang’s annotated 2006.

This excerpt is from the Coca-Cola website:

Most people can agree on what Santa Claus looks like — jolly, with a red suit and a white beard. But he did not always look that way, and Coca-Cola® advertising actually helped shape this modern-day image of Santa.

2006 marks the 75th anniversary of the famous Coca-Cola Santa Claus. Starting in 1931, magazine ads for Coca-Cola featured St. Nick as a kind, jolly man in a red suit. Because magazines were so widely viewed, and because this image of Santa appeared for more than three decades, the image of Santa most people have today is largely based on our advertising.

But the crack research team at Snopes deconstructs the legend and declares it not entirely true:

This legend is not true. Although some versions of the Santa Claus figure still had him attired in various colors of outfits past the beginning of the 20th century, the jolly, ruddy, sack-carrying Santa with a red suit and flowing white whiskers had become the standard image of Santa Claus by the 1920s, several years before Sundlom drew his first Santa illustration for Coca-Cola. As The New York Times reported on 27 November 1927: “A standardized Santa Claus appears to New York children. Height, weight, stature are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the hood and the white whiskers. The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also inevitable parts of the requisite make-up.” … All this isn’t to say that Coca-Cola didn’t have anything to do with cementing that image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness. The Santa image may have been standardized before Coca-Cola adopted it for their advertisements, but Coca-Cola had a great deal to do with establishing Santa Claus as a ubiquitous Christmas figure in America at a time when the holiday was still making the transition from a religious observance to a largely secular and highly commercial celebration. I

Now I’m off for Dallas for 10 days…

1. “One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord.” (Romans 14:5-6a)

2. Who celebrates New Year’s on New Year’s Day? Celebrate on the Eve or earlier, at hundreds of Christmas Celebrations before Sunday, December 25th, 2005 [multiple services]:

Willow Creek Community Church (South Barrington, IL) [8]
Southland Christian Church (Nicholasville, KY) [4]
Crossroads Christian Church (Lexington, KY) [3]
Fellowship Church (Grapevine, TX) [11]
Watermark Community Church (Dallas, TX) [2]
Redemption World Outreach Center (Greenville, SC) [2 live, 6 streamed online]
Seacoast Church (Charleston, SC and other locations) [16]
North Point Community Church (Alpharetta, GA) [3]
Grace Fellowship Church (Timonium, MD) [5]
Church of the Redeemer (Gaithersburg, MD) [4]
Northview Christian Life Church (Carmel, IN) [5]
Grace Community Church (Noblesville, IN) [6]
Calvary Chapel (Fort Lauderdale, FL) [9]
Christ Fellowship (Palm Beach Gardens, FL) [13]
Flamingo Road Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL) [5]
Christ the Rock Community Church (Cooper City, FL) [4]
RockHarbor (Costa Mesa, CA) [7]
Northland, A Church Distributed (Longwood, FL) [10]
Kensington Community Church (Troy, MI) [18]
Bridgeway Community Church (Columbia, MD) [6]
Grace Community Church (Columbia, MD) [6]
Reston Bible Church (Reston, VA) [3]
Journey’s Crossing (Gaithersburg, MD) [2]
NewSpring Church (Anderson, SC) [5]
LifeChurch (locations in OK and AZ and TX) [20]
Neighborhood Church (Redding, CA) [4]
Center Point Church (North Richland Hills, TX) [3]
Revolution Church (Long Beach, CA) [2]

And even though Willow Creek Closes Doors on Christmas; Hybels Still to Preach on Sunday at a different church:

Two of the largest mega churches in the Chicago area will join hands this holiday season to hold what may possibly be the largest Christmas Day service in the nation. The Rev. Bill Hybels of Willowcreek Church will preach alongside the Rev. James Meeks of the House of Hope Church in Chicago. Together, the two churches have more than 30,000 members.

And here’s a flashy invite to experience Christmas Presence. I’ll see how many services I can experience, though probably short of 20. Merry Christmas to you and yours!

I had first picked up on this breaking story via the CT Weblog, as it made its circuit over mainstream news media (with lots of help from the AP wire), and then yesterday landing on the front page of the New York Times: When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off (cf. more at Google News search). According to Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church in greater Atlanta, his church had been closed on the Sunday after Christmas since it started, but it seems only this year that it has generated buzz [cf. a most lengthy commentary by InternetMonk; and lengthy comment thread at GetReligion].

I’ll not track down all the articles and blogs buzzing about this. We all love snow days, students and teachers alike. Just as we have school closings for snow here in the metro DC area, here’s the unofficial list of church closings on Christmas:

Church Closings for December 25th, 2005 (no links, b/c they’re closed after 100s of celebrations)

Willow Creek Community Church (South Barrington, IL)
Southland Christian Church (Nicholasville, KY)
Crossroads Christian Church (Lexington, KY)
Fellowship Church (Grapevine, TX)
Watermark Community Church (Dallas, TX)
Redemption World Outreach Center (Greenville, SC)
Seacoast Church (Charleston, SC and other locations)
North Point Community Church (Alpharetta, GA)
First Baptist Church (Atlanta, GA)
Mars Hill Bible Church (Grandville, MI)
Grace Fellowship Church (Timonium, MD)
Church of the Redeemer (Gaithersburg, MD) (changed)
Northview Christian Life Church (Carmel, IN)
Grace Community Church (Noblesville, IN)
Calvary Chapel (Fort Lauderdale, FL) (changed)
Christ Fellowship (Palm Beach Gardens, FL)
Flamingo Road Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Christ the Rock Community Church (Cooper City, FL)
RockHarbor (Costa Mesa, CA)
Harbor Christian Center (Gig Harbor, WA)
Northland, A Church Distributed (Longwood, FL)
Kensington Community Church (Troy, MI)
Calvary Christian Center (Louisville, KY)
Ambassador Bible Church (Centreville, VA)
All Souls Church, Unitarian (Washington, DC)
Lord of Life Church (Indiana, PA)
Skyline Presbyterian Church (Tacoma, WA) (changed)
Bridgeway Community Church (Columbia, MD)
Grace Community Church (Columbia, MD)
History Church (Oak Hill, VA)
National Community Church (Washington, DC)
Reston Bible Church (Reston, VA)
Mosaic Manhattan (New York City, NY)
The River Church (Poughkeepsie, NY)
Journey’s Crossing (Gaithersburg, MD)
Discovery Christian Church (Pittsburgh, PA)
Watermarke Church (Canton, GA)
Liquid (Austin, TX)
St. Paul’s Collegiate Church at Storrs (Storrs, CT)
NewSpring Church (Anderson, SC)
LifeChurch (locations in OK and AZ)
Neighborhood Church (Redding, CA)
Center Point Church (North Richland Hills, TX)
Ethnos (San Diego, CA)
Revolution Church (Long Beach, CA)
Mariners’ Church (Annapolis, MD)

I love going to all kinds of churches. Our family tradition for Christmas and Easter is not to stay home, but to attend as many churches as possible. So for people in the church-forsaken places like Chicagoland, Dallas, and Atlanta, here are some churches open for Christmas [recommend a church for thousands who are without - add a comment below]:

New Community Covenant Church (Chicago, IL)
Grace Outreach Center (Plano, TX)
Prestonwood Baptist Church (Plano, TX)
Park Cities Presbyterian Church (Dallas, TX)
Lifepoint Community Church (Greenville, SC)
Mount Paran Church of God (Atlanta, GA)
Crossroads Church of Atlanta
Perimeter Church (Atlanta, GA)
Resurrection Life Church (Grandville, MI)
Gaithersburg Community Church (Gaithersburg, MD)
McLean Bible Church (McLean, VA)
Providence Baptist Church (Raleigh, NC)
Young Nak English Ministry (Los Angeles, CA)
Cedar Ridge Community Church (Spencerville, MD)
Barstow Free Methodist Church (Barstow, CA)
Faith Community Church (West Covina, CA)
ChurchReviews.org listings (for Louisville; Chicago)
Barrington Houses of Worship
my index of online church directories and search engines

* Note: neither listing above is disapproval nor endorsement – simply public information; also listen to NPR’s All Things Considered piece on this [aired on 12/14/05]