For every 1 car that drives into your church 99 drive past—and I bet almost all love Christmas music. The acceptance of Christmas music in certain parts of our wider culture allows a unique occasion for witness and thinking outside the walls of our chapel. … Christmas is a huge opportunity for church musicians. If we can get that right, it sets us up for the next year and helps us re-adjust our thinking to ensure other things can find their rightful place.

The ever-approaching beat of Christmas is enough for many church musicians (and their staff, family, and pastors) to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and lacking in creative freshness. We have to work harder, produce better, innovate wider, and handle over-committed volunteers and their opinions. All the while we’re stressed, budget-squeezed, and of course, must still deal with all the usual personal and family pressures while wondering how on earth we can find a “new angle” on the Christmas story.

As a local church musician and composer who’s involved in an annual touring Christmas production, I offer several instructive principles for this highly anticipated time of year.

1. Remember that Christmas is a huge opportunity to sing the gospel.

There are more people in our churches over Christmas who are on the outside looking in than at any other time of the year—children, children’s families, nominals, friends, neighbors, and the needy of every description.

Moreover we have inherited this privilege through the faithful witness of generations of faithful believers. This season may not always be such an open evangelistic opportunity.

My high school music teacher opened my eyes to the real beauty of Christmas carols. He claims he wants his funeral to be a service of carols. Why? Because they tell the story of our faith. Indeed, the greatest carols tell the gospel story in all its undeniable richness. They tell it more beautifully, more succinctly, more elegantly than almost anywhere else.

Let’s start with the rest so many long for in the advent season:

Come thou long expected Jesus
born to set they people free.
From our fears and sins release us
let us find our rest in thee.

Or the beautiful sense of forgiveness in the face of deep regret that pervades the season in Phillips Brooks’s masterpiece:

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given
so God imparts to human hearts
the blessings of his heaven
no ear may hear his coming
but in this world of sin
where meek souls will receive him still
the dear Christ enters in.

These songs speak of the One who gives the peace and rest every soul craves to find. And while this gospel story should be the core of every Sunday worship service, it finds new hearers during Christmas when many who don’t yet know the Lord attend a church service. What a great opportunity; what a great challenge—to clearly and artfully present this world-changing story in the songs we select, present, and sing together! In the eagerness for musical innovation let’s not compromise on content.

2. Explore and immerse yourself in the abundance of historic church Christmas music.

These are the real “crossover” songs of Christian music—appearing in movies, musicals, television shows, commercials, novels, and radio charts; affecting the education of countless generations; sung more frequently and knowingly and passionately in the public square than any modern song likely ever will.

With traditional carols, there is a sense of familiarity, quality, depth, and relevance to the whole church body that a modern-based diet can almost never bring. Christmas music is the best place to see this contrast. The most widely known carols are written by the greatest composers in history, including Beethoven, Handel, Holst, and Mendelssohn. Others are a unique hybrid of folk music and church music traditions that have stood the test of time. The poems of Christina Rossetti, Phillips Brooks, as well as Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts arrest both the mind and heart.

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