Church Christmas Ideas
Ho, ho, ho: Christmas is coming! It’s one of the two times per year when your church is most likely to have guests. It’s also a big celebration in its own right. How is your church going to welcome visitors and celebrate? We’ve got your church Christmas ideas ready.
How to Get Started:
We’ve got a lot of Christmas resources to share, so let’s start simple:
1. Free Resources
We’ve got lots of free Christmas articles below, but allow us to highlight a few free resources:
- 30 Days of Planning Christmas: We’ll send an email every day for 30 days with helpful Christmas content. It’s a great way to kickstart your planning process and generate ideas and encouragement. Sign up now >>
- Christmas Welcome Kit: Grab our free Christmas welcome kit to make sure your guests truly feel welcome.
- Photo Checklist: As the big day approaches, you’re too busy to think about details. Our free Christmas photo checklist can help.
- Social Media Graphic: Grab a free Christmas social graphic and check one more thing off your to-do list.
2. Read the Book
We wrote the book on Christmas planning. Seriously, it’s called God Rest Ye Stressed Communicators: Planning Christmas for Your Church. It’s full of practical ideas and examples to help your church spread the love and joy of the season.
It’s a good place to start, if we do say so ourselves.
The Christmas Opportunity
“Christmas is filled with opportunity. You can pull off some amazing things because people’s hearts are already there.” –Gary Molander
More Christmas encouragement videos:
- Saddleback’s Anthony Miller encourages you to tell your story this Christmas.
- Stephen Brewster: “This is your moment. You got this.”
- As Christmas looms large, Lori Bailey offers hope.
Church Christmas Ideas & Resources
We’ve got loads of Christmas resources to help your church. We’ve separated them into three different areas to help you find what you need:
- Planning and Promotion
- Ideas and Examples
- Over-Christmased
1. Planning and Promotion
Your church Christmas ideas need to be planned in advance and promoted properly. Don’t just wing it or think that because it’s Christmas the people will just come.
Christmas in July (or Whenever You Start)
Is it too early for Christmas? It’s never too early to start Christmas planning.
We explored Christmas in July, asking half a dozen church communicators their thoughts. This can be helpful, no matter when you start your planning:
- Favorite Christmas service.
- Best way to promote Christmas (SPOILER ALERT: Word of mouth).
- What about Advent?
- How to survive Christmas.
- Christmas for small churches.
More Christmas Planning and Promotion Ideas
Here’s even more help as you start your planning process:
- Church attendance balloons to 47% at Christmas.
- Be warm and inspiring. (Also, get a free Christmas mini-movie download.)
- Guests come for Christmas, and your church needs to be welcoming. Grab our free Christmas welcome kit to make sure your church is full of welcome this Christmas.
- 6 ways you can promote your Christmas events, from lumpy mail to micro-sites.
- Think of Christmas as an on-ramp to your church.
- Identifying problems and barriers led to one church starting a Christmas light display.
- Keep your geography in mind. If you’ve got snow, use it. If you’ve got cacti, work it.
- “Think inside your box. Let your limitations fuel your greatest creativity.” –Wade Joye
- Embrace tradition: There’s a reason A Charlie Brown Christmas features Linus reading from the Gospel of Luke.
- 3 tips: Get the right day (Christmas Eve), offer the right experience (no baby Jesus on a zip line—people like tradition) and bring people back.
- A memorable story is rooted in action. Just ask Saint Nick.
- 10 ideas to engage people on social media.
- Our podcast covers Christmas planning with Scott McClellan and a social media Christmas with Haley Veturis.
- 57 Christmas videos your church can use.
- “Guests don’t want to see some made up version of who you are at Christmas, so make sure you’re true to yourself.” –Bethany Russell
- How to plan a massive, community-wide Christmas event.
- 25 last-minute Christmas ideas.
- 4 ways your church can use social media at Christmas.
- You don’t have to reinvent Christmas every year. Remember Advent? Embrace the idea of Advent and get your congregation in the Christmas spirit with an Advent devotional.
- Christmas is the story of a virgin mother and an illegitimate baby. It’s never what we expect. Let’s remember just how radical Christmas is.
- What about after Christmas? Have a plan to bring people back.
- And remember that some people will never come back. Do you have a way to reach them?
- Checklists: Free Christmas photo checklist and a last-minute Christmas checklist.
“If you could do nothing else but read from the Gospel of Luke you would be communicating the greatest story of all.” –Shawn Wood
2. Ideas and Examples
Getting inspired with church Christmas ideas can be tough, especially if you’re doing your planning and it’s anything but Christmas outside. But we’ve got plenty of examples and inspiration to get you motivated. But don’t just steal these ideas, use them as a starting point to get you thinking. Be inspired to create something unique for your church.
Telling the Christmas story with 600+ Instagram photos is a great start:
- 25 examples of what makes Christmas special at different churches.
- Check out this roundup of Christmas ideas including mini disco balls, holiday parades and importing snow to Arizona.
- A Wisconsin church shares how they made Christmas work on half the budget.
- Try passing out Christmas survival boxes to encourage people to invite friends and family.
- One church offers a Christmas service to bless families.
- “We’re going to serve our community for 12 days during Christmas. We couldn’t think of a better way to express the true heart of Christmas.” –Stephen Brewster
- One church organized flashmobs to support Salvation Army Bell Ringers and an organization that fights human trafficking as part of their unexpected Christmas series.
- Chuck Scoggins shares what his church has done for Christmas and how it’s changed over the years: “As you’re planning Christmas, think about what it is your community needs your church to be.”
Church on the Move offers a commentary track of their entire Christmas service, explaining what they did and why they did it.- New Life Church ditches their multi-week Christmas series in December and focuses on Christmas Eve.
- Christmas designs from the Church Marketing Lab: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.
Learn more about how this video came together.
3. Over-Christmased?
As we get closer to Christmas and the stress ramps up, be sure to keep things in perspective:
“Who cares if your Christmas festivities are worthy of Broadway if your entire church staff is cold, tense and irritable because of an unhealthy hyperfocus on performance? … Happiness is contagious. Enjoy your Christmas.” –Kent Shaffer
If the Christmas cheer is a little too much, maybe you need to step back.
- Whew, Christmas can be exhausting: A Christmas pep talk from Kelley Hartnett.
- Stop skipping Christmas. As you do all this work to prepare your church, remember that Christmas is for you too.
- Being overworked and super stressed at the holidays is not cool. Take a break.
- Sometimes we need more interruptions.
- Check out Surviving Christmas: Advent Devotions for the Hard & Holy Holidays by Anne Marie Miller or download our free 7-day Advent devotional sampler (get the full devotional as a Courageous Storytellers member).
- “Try not to offer so many service opportunities and giving opportunities and projects and programs and shows and different things for people to do this season that they actually miss the true message of Christmas.” –Bethany Russell
- Maybe you need to rethink Christmas. And no, we’re not talking about the Grinch. We’re talking about cool resources like Advent Conspiracy and churches doing capital campaigns to help the homeless.
- Or maybe you just need something weird to laugh at, like the story of Christ’s crucifixion told in flashing Christmas lights:
Free Christmas Graphic to Share
Go tell it on the social media mountain with this free Christmas graphic:
We hope your church Christmas ideas come together, and we wish your congregation a merry Christmas.
