the Advent Conspiracy

Three years ago, during Ian's first Christmas, Eric and I started rethinking how we wanted to celebrate Christmas as a family and how we wanted Ian to understand the whole holiday. At eight months old, he had piles of presents so large we literally had to rearrange his bedroom to make room for all the toys, clothes, and books he received from loving and generous family members. While we were thankful for the displays of affection, we couldn't escape the lurking feeling that something was just not complete about the Christmas process we were experiencing and had experienced up to that point. Our parents (who are all very wonderful people) did make attempts to "keep Christ in Christmas" by doing things like reading the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke before our gift-giving extravaganzas and attending Christmas Eve services at our churches, but the reality for both of us was that, as kids, Christmas was more about getting what we wanted than it was about worshiping Christ and loving others. Maybe that was partly due to our lack of maturity, but a big part of it was also that we really didn't know how else to go about it. Even as newly-married adults, we slipped right in to trying to meet the expectations set for us by our culture: buying an abundance of gifts for pretty much everyone we knew. While the attention shifted away from "me me me" (at least on the surface), it was still a rather emotionally and economically stressful experience every year, with very little focus on the miracle of Christ's birth and our opportunity to share His love with the world, except for four or five Sunday mornings at church. This really started to bother us. We asked ourselves things like: "How much do we really need to give or receive? How can we teach Ian to be truly generous rather than succumbing to societal pressures of feigned generosity? How can we teach him to be content with what he has? How can we teach ourselves these things?"

So the past three Christmases have been a gradual alteration of our Christmas practices. We're not exactly sure what we're aiming at, but we do want Ian not only to see us being generous, but also to get to experience it himself. And we want the focus of Christmas to truly be on the incredible miracle of Christ's incarnation and the profound effect that has on our lives. So we're doing things like having nightly Advent devotions, talking about our waiting for Christ's coming, both the first time and the upcoming second time. We're limiting the number of our gifts to each other to one meaningful gift and giving our loved ones gifts that are relational in nature, so as to foster peace and goodwill among one another. We're spending less on ourselves and more on people who are really hurting or without basic needs. All in all, we're trying to find more ways to love others around us as an outpouring of the outrageous love we've received from Christ.

And, of course, we're still working out what that all looks like. Thankfully, about three years ago, a small group of pastors around the country started thinking the same things and asking the same questions, unbeknownst to us. They formed this movement called "the Advent Conspiracy," and encouraged their congregations to focus on four ideas during the Christmas season: worship fully, spend less, give more, and love all. With the money leftover from what they didn't spend on extra gifts, they pooled their resources to dig wells for people who didn't have fresh water. Over the course of four Christmas seasons (and the time in-between), people have been hopping on board and the movement has been growing. So much so, in fact, that even our little church in South Bend, Indiana is discussing ways to implement these ideas, and our pastor is teaching them from the pulpit. Both CNN and Time Magazine did pieces on what's going on. Through hundreds of churches, millions of dollars have been given to help the poor, and ideas are flowing about ways to be intentional and generous with our gift-giving. What I love about them is that they're not taking a single penny for themselves. They're a movement, not an organization. They exist merely to facilitate the implementation of true generosity and the exhibition of Christ's love for us.

Anyone else out there interested in joining the conspiracy?
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