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Beverly church brings nativity to community
December, 2002
Church of the Cove, UCC, in Beverly is planning to go head-to-head with Santa Claus this Christmas.
This graphic was adapted from a photo of the living creche at First Church of Christ in Bedford. In an attempt to lure families away from the mall and toward a more meaningful Christmas, the church is planning a truly living nativity, in which everyone who comes will have a role to play.
“We’ll be bringing what is so often done inside the sanctuary for the in-crowd outside for the community,” said Pastor Ian Rex. “The average family out there is thinking ‘which mall am I going to bring my children to so they can see Santa’ – this is something that will hopefully be phenomenal compared to that.”
The church’s “live nativity experience” will take place in front of the church on the Saturday evening before Christmas.
Like other live nativity scenes, it will include a lighted manger, people playing the traditional Christmas roles and real animals.
But, in an attempt to include everyone, organizers plan to provide extra shepherd and angel costumes so that every child who comes can join in. There will be caroling, refreshments and even a craft table where families can make something to take home – perhaps an ornament or Yule log – to serve as a reminder of the night.
And it will all be offered free of charge.
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"It’s a nice opportunity for us to be able to share this with everybody,” said Sally Varney, one of the planners. “We want people who aren’t from the church to be able to stop by and see it and be touched by it.”
“The whole meaning of Christmas is the birth of Jesus Christ, and that is so meaningful for us as Christians,” she said. “For outsiders who may not be Christians or have faith in Jesus Christ, or who might not have a faith at all, this might somehow witness to them, open their eyes, transforming their lives.”
Rex said he had the idea for the event last Christmas, while watching the annual Christmas pageant.“I looked out at who was there, and it was the same people in the sanctuary,” he said. “I thought that we had to do something outdoors that reaches out to the community.”
Rex shared his vision with the church, and asked for volunteers for a ministry team to develop the plans. That’s when something amazing happened.
“The people who started signing up were all new attenders within the last year,” Rex said.Rex said that new people in the church feel comfortable working on a new ministry, because there are no preexisting expectations or assumptions about how it should be done.
“Just by gathering we’re creating something new,” Rex said “That is a huge way of gaining the trust of new attenders and helping them achieve a sense of belonging within the congregation.”
Rex learned about developing ministry teams through reading and through the Massachusetts Conference’s ongoing Vital Congregations program, in which church leaders gather in area clusters for training and to share ways of revitalizing their ministries.
The Church in the Cove also has a garden ministry team, which this past season planted and tended a Mission Garden and vegetable stand. The garden had three goals: to offer children and youth in the community an outside classroom for learning of God’s love; to provide vegetables and income for the local soup kitchen ministry; and to bring the neighborhood into closer relationship with the church’s ministry.
Bible study is an important part of the gatherings of the garden ministry team. Similarly, each time the living nativity team meets they start off with discussions of their own faith journeys.
“It’s important for us all to share our journeys with one another. It kind of helps us brings things into perspective,” Varney said. “We can sit back and say ‘if this was me 15 years ago, and I saw this nativity, this would have really touched my life.’”
