Why will this Christmas season be a good time to share the gospel?

Each year, churches and Christians see the end of the year period arrive to put in place actions to spread the word of the Gospel. Since Christmas is “children's day”, they are naturally called upon to contribute. Through end-of-year shows or cartoon screenings, they are honored.

But this association between Christmas and children led in its wake a common reaction: Christmas is not a "serious" celebration. It's "the magic of Christmas", it's a fairy-tale fantasy, it's a whole more or less modern mythology, Father Christmas, Saint-Nicolas, the smoke escaping from the chimney of a snow-covered cottage . These are tales made up of good feelings and nostalgia. But all this is done to artificially soften a daily life that has nothing magical about it.

Yet Christians consider this event to go far beyond. And in this, they struggle to convince those around them as the weight of the imagery attached to Christmas takes place in the public space and in the collective unconscious.

The biblical event of Christmas - the birth of Christ - becomes almost awkward in a secularized French society in which the post-truth era is nesting. Associate a popular festival with colossal commercial stakes, with a fundamental religious event for a specific community, that is not done. Because this association comes to put a grain of sand a little too big in the cogs of a secular ideology where some would like to remove all the religious reference in general, and Christian in particular.

The fact is there. Even if some Christians, sawing the branch on which they are sitting, come to castigate the feast of Christmas (see on this subject my article "Yes to Christmas, no to anti-Christmas" of December 23, 2020), this event remains a privileged opportunity to talk about Christ, his birth, his life, his message.

Consequently, any person having the desire to speak about his faith finds there a ground on which it is in all points legitimate. Christmas is a major anchor for starting from what people know and bringing them to what they may not know.

Churches and Christians will redouble their efforts again this year to seize the opportunity and announce the birth of their Savior.

Pascal Portoukalian

Article originally published in October 2021.