God Rest Ye Stressed Communicators: Planning Christmas for Your Church is a collection of writings from the folks at Church Marketing Sucks/The Center for Church Communication designed to help church leaders and church techs rethink, retool, and revive their outlook on Christmas. That’s what it was designed to do, and that’s precisely what it does. It validates the stress and pressure upon us to “present” Christmas successfully, and yet it redefines that as “effectively,” meaning that it should be done for the glory of God and the advancing of His kingdom. It does this quite well while still reminding us that the hard work of Christmas—Christ’s work—has been done, so what are we so stressed about?
The Good
At first glance, I thought it would be a “more money, more flash, more AWESOME” approach, but the book proved to be a great balance of pro-polish and yet pro-authenticity tips that just might make this Christmas the best one since the first one. In fact, the last two chapters alone were with it for the challenging, perhaps even sanity-saving words they offered.
The Bad
The only issue I had with the book was that some chapters trampled on others with a bit of receptiveness, which is only to be expected in a group effort like this. I don’t want that to dissuade you from purchasing a copy; there’s still plenty of content in the book to make it worth your time and you dime.
Wrapping Up (See what I did there?)
I know that we’re well into—and therefore, almost out of—November, but it’s been a crazy November for me, and you may think it’s too late to learn anything useful for this Christmas, but I think you’re wrong. I’ve found several different ideas in the book that I will be applying this year. Now, maybe you’re not seeing this until DECEMBER. Surely that’s too late, right? No, I don’t think so. There area some ideas in here that can be applied quickly with no money involved, and yet even if there weren’t, this book would still be valuable as a way of opening your eyes to how you celebrate Christmas, as you are in the middle of it, so that next year can be better.
– Readability (5.0)
– Breadth/Depth of Content (4.5)
– Helpfulness (5.0)
Recommended? – If you’re a church tech/pastor who wants to take your church’s Christmas programming to a new level of effectiveness, then you won’t find a better starting point.
God Rest Ye Stressed Communicators is edited by Elizabyth Ladwig and Kevin D. Hendricks.
You can buy it from CFC Labs.
A copy of this book was provided to me for free in exchange for an honest review.
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