Hundreds of churches in the US and now some in the UK and Africa are joining the movement to de-commercialise Christmas and restore it back to its true purpose of celebrating the birth of Christ.
"What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?" the creators of Advent Conspiracy pose.
"Everyone wants Christmas to be meaningful but instead it becomes shop, shop, shop, credit cards, traffic jams, to do lists, useless gifts, then off to church," says a promotional video. In the end, people are just left with debt, gifts to return and an empty feeling of missed purpose.
For many, including pastors, Christmas has become a painful holiday especially when trying to lead their congregations in worship amid the distractions and stress of the consumer culture.
"[We] lamented that we hated Christmas," said Pastor Rick McKinley of Imago Dei Community Church in Portland, Oregon, during his latest sermon on Sunday.
"We hated the fact that we were talking about one of the pinnacles of theology – that here is God becoming flesh and entering our world to bring salvation and peace and restore His whole creation, While we preach and declare and get all excited about that, the truth is the message just becomes white noise because within our cultural context there's so much hecticness that's involved around the holidays," he added.
On top of the consumer culture, Christians have not effectively conveyed the message of Christmas to the public.
"We started looking at what the Church's response has been," McKinley said as he recalled what he and a few other pastors discussed three years ago. "It has been to critique the culture for not talking about Jesus or saying Merry Christmas."
"So there's this idea that when I'm running through the mall ... [people] should tell me Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays. That's a very lame place for the church to draw a line in the sand," the Portland church pastor said.
