The Santa Ban, Part 2

I've gotten a whole bunch o' comments, mostly by email, to the original "Santa Ban" post. Of course, it helps that I trolled for hits on that one, so I guess I was pretty shameless!

All but a couple of the responses were in agreement with what I wrote. Surprisingly, most of them also saw the humor in my questions! I must confess to being a bit nervous about that. One even thanked me for taking a light approach to the issue. Whew! Glad that went over well.

The general idea behind the post was actually not the issue of Santa. I'm pretty laid back on that one. Santa does not strike fear into my heart. I'm not even so sure that Santa has hidden the true meaning of Christmas . I think our own materialism has done that. Santa has simply evolved with our culture, and our church folks are just as, or more, guilty in the materialism than the culture itself. The multiple celebrations that take literally hours have become a chore, not a joy. People love buying gifts, especially for children, but it has gotten to the point where the kids don't even enjoy it because they are too exhausted by the overwhelming task of opening present after present. It used to be that people would open gifts one at a time in order to share the joy of opening gifts. Now people open gifts all at once because it would take twelve hours to get through the gift opening if people went one at a time.

Actually, the more specific point behind the original post had to do with how the church deals with business. There is a quick prayer at the beginning of the meeting, sometimes a gentle reminder to be nice (which shouldn't even be necessary, but it is!), and then a curtsy to Robert's Rules of Order. Get through the agenda, hope there isn't a fight, assume that the person speaking has their own agenda, and it must not be the same as yours, and push for a decision. The fact that the congregation gets to vote on almost everything helps to bog down the process, and, as Sunday night demonstrated, allows for items of personal interest to get pushed through by rallying friends and family ahead of time and not allowing time for prayer and reflection. Buy hey, we were done by 7:30!

I've begun to think that our City Council has a much better process than our church. The Council meets, allows a time for public comments, and then does the work. Yeah, people can lobby the aldermen and alderwomen, pay for their campaigns, buy influence, etc, but ultimately, the people who LIVE in the ward vote for the person (note: the businesses in the ward DON'T vote for the person--Hear that Alderman Holt?). It's not quite so easily divided up in the church. We don't have wards based on where people live. Still, what if our church council had open meetings and took "public" comments at the beginning of the meeting? What if they met more often so that issues such as Santa weren't brought up at a congregational meeting, but at a council meeting? Most of the City business gets done at committee level. The public can give opinions on topics that are important to them, but the Council actually (get this) LEADS and MAKES DECISIONS. Every issue gets cycled into a committee, so every issue is given thought before a vote is taken on it. Shouldn't we, as the Church be just as careful with our decisions?

People hate politics and politicians (at least in the abstract), but our governmental systems seem to be much better at thinking things through (often to the point of absurdity) than other systems. I'd much rather have the absurdity of governmental delays than the absurdities that I pointed out yesterday!