I love the preparations for Christmas. I find myself thinking about old friends as I write Christmas cards, I’m as excited as a six year old when opening the doors on my Advent calendar. I can’t wait to put up the tree, and I want my kitchen to smell of spices and baking throughout December. As a member of the clergy, there are lots of practical tasks to prepare for too.

I see from my diary for 2006, when I was a curate in a group of rural parishes, that there were 19 different carol services in the benefice in the space of three weeks! Ministering at Christmas is an enormous joy and privilege, but there’s always a lot to do.

That’s one reason that I’m always delighted by the number of people who offer to help with the preparations. Across the Diocese, churchgoers will be visiting the housebound, the sick, the isolated and the lonely. They’ll be organising parties for the Sunday School, the Senior Citizens group, the Youth Fellowship and the Parents and Toddlers. They’ll be in schools, churches and church halls, helping to make Christingles, packing boxes with gifts to be sent to projects overseas or closer to home, and dusting off the decorations. They’ll volunteer to do readings at Nine Lessons and Carols, they’ll swell numbers in the choir, and they’ll spend long evenings delivering greetings and service details to every house in the parish.

There’s a lot of talk in the Church about what the parish ministry might look like in the future. We wonder about the financial situation, about secularism, and about society’s attitude to faith. It’s easy to become discouraged. But every Christmas, when I see so much being done together as church – as the whole people of God – my heart sings. I love the way Luke’s gospel tells us that the first people to tell the good news about Jesus, were not the priests, nor the wise men, but the shepherds. They told Mary and Joseph what they had heard from the angels about the child, and they returned to their work and their homes praising and glorifying God.
Christmas seems to give us permission to be church in a very active way, and that seems to me to be the very essence of Christian discipleship. Working together for God, to make things happen, and to make a difference. And doing it with joy.

So thank you for all that you do to share in the ministry of the Church. But don’t let it just be a seasonal thing. As the slogan has it, it’s not just for Christmas – it’s for life.
The Revd Amanda Bloor is Chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford.