Advent at Emmanuel Baptist in Saskatoon is a very practical season. They’ve taken the sometimes lofty themes of hope, love, peace and joy, and broken them down to socks and diapers.
“Hope, love, peace and joy are agents of light, and they only come alive when we’re active in them,” said Worship and Creative Arts pastor Rob Priestley.
“Light is a practical thing,” added Kari Elliott, who works with Rob in creative arts and serves as Emmanuel’s Director of Care & Community.
During the first Sunday of Advent, a giving tree is set up at the front of the sanctuary where people hang socks and mittens for the local shelter.
“The shelter said they had a whole bunch of people who needed sock and mittens, so we thought let’s get our church to supply them,” Kari said.
Meeting needs of others is a deliberate part of observing Advent in practice. “Especially for the kids to see something like socks, which they don’t normally think of as a gifts, to be waited and looked for and wanted by people in the city. It helps them to understand the waiting and longing of Advent.”
On top of the giving tree, Emmanuel fills gift baskets for three local agencies whom they partner with throughout the year. For the Saskatoon Pregnancy Options Centre, they include things like diapers and journals—whatever has been asked for. They also donate needed items to Hope Restored and the Bridge Fellowship Centre. The agencies then distribute the gifts to their communities as needed.
“We tell our congregation stories of what happens when we deliver the gifts,” Kari said. “We’re trying to spark imagination that neighbourhood is wherever you are. The idea is to make this not look hard, so we can do more imagining of other ways to be involved in the community.”
Visual representations are a big way they observe Advent at church – and something they do regularly throughout the year.
“This year, the big theme I’m working through is the interplay with light and dark. Light in this instance is God’s coming. We’re still using the traditional Advent themes of hope, love, peace and joy, but trying to focus on them through the concepts of light & dark,” Rob said.
The stage will be fashioned to look like a winter forest. Not the beautiful snow dusted kind, but a barren, brown, everything’s-dead kind of way.
“I always chop the top off Christmas trees,” Rob laughed. “It’s not so nice and tidy. It’s meant as an invitation to the light on the horizon.”
One good thing about being in the community for a long time—he’s been at Emmanuel Baptist for 19 years—is that people get to know you, and see what you do differently. “If something is jarring, they’re willing to look at what the meaning might be,” Rob said.
Advent, according to the traditional church calendar, is different from Christmas; it’s the leading up to Christmas. It’s a time of waiting, longing for the Messiah to come and redeem our darkness. The waiting for light can feel like tingly anticipation. Or a desperate, wrenching need. It can be awkward to observe Advent in this way, when glitzy Christmas decorations are on display in October. But it’s important to do.
“People just want to get to the good parts of things, you know. Like jump right to the front of the line and get to the happy part,” Rob said. “But the church calendar helps push us through with intentionality. The reality is that some people are in the dark, it does a disservice to not sit in darkness with them. Hope doesn’t come in nice, neat packages. This longing and waiting allows people to give voice to the longing for days that are clear and peaceful.”