Advent for Protestants!

Jeff asked about resources for Advent in a comment on a previous post. Sorry to say that I don’t know of much that is available (although skip towards the end for a couple of books that I’ve found helpful). Over the years I’ve had to write stuff for myself and this is how I’ve done it.

For me, the value of Advent is in the opportunity to slow down and appreciate the wonder of God’s self-revelation through his Son. Christmas is such a rush when we try to pack the whole story into the small box that is a traditional Carol Service. So I’ve always tried to think a little outside the box to make the most of the time.

In case this is a completely foreign land to you, Advent consists of the four weeks running up to Christmas counted using the Sundays. So, this year, the first Sunday in Advent is December 3rd and the fourth will be Christmas Eve.

We make a decision to start using more overtly Christmas songs from the first Sunday, slowly building towards our Carol Service when we will sing many of the traditional carols with one or two more recent songs. We don’t want to sing all the same carols every week for four weeks, so we try to draw up a working list for the four weeks. Our style of worship makes this reasonably easy to do. We also make sure we frame our worship around the theme of the incarnation for these four Sundays.

Visually, we begin to decorate the church over this time too. It’s the advantage of having a building that you can do this. But there are other ways. We have artists in the church who do backdrops (we built a stable stage set one year!) and we’re trying to do some creative window designs (we have plain glass in our windows). We also have an Advent wreath. This has five candles on it, and we light one, then two, then three etc, week by week.

As to the themes we use, well I’ve mostly done those myself. It usually starts with something familiar within the context of the nativity story and I work out from there. So this year my theme is Love Unlimited and we’ll look at this through the eyes of the incarnation but we won’t start there. At the moment I’m working on exactly how I’m going to do this (I’ve been unwell for a couple of weeks and got really behind with the planning). I’m trying to work out the overall plan for the Carol Service and then use that to shape the weeks running up to it. Here’s the basic outline:

Love Unlimited

Promised in the past: What God said through the prophets and the Old Testament story
Anticipated at the time: What were people waiting for? What are people looking for today?
Fulfilled in Christ’s coming:
Completed in his time: A look at God’s purposes and future promises (probably!)

Some things may change as I work on these ideas, but you get the flavour.

Past themes have included looking at the nativity through the eyes of the different players. So we’ve done Mary’s story, Joseph’s story, the shepherds’ story. We’ve done things like Christmas Unwrapped, Not just for Christmas (how the story of Jesus affects the whole of life) and one year we looked at the names of Jesus and what they mean. So we did Emmanuel, Messiah, and Jesus (I can’t remember the fourth one of the top of my head).


This was last year’s poster and invitation.



One resource that does come to mind is a book by Max Lucado called One Incredible Moment. This is an anthology of extracts from many of his books. The narrative style lends itself to be read in services and I try to write in a similar style for the narrative parts of our events. Another Max Lucado book for Christmas is God came near.

We’ve also used videos. We’ve used some of the videos available through people like Midnight Oil and we’ve done some ourselves. Willow Creek have some great music and we’ve used music, PowerPoint etc to provide moments of reflection during services.

Okay, hope that helps and inspires.