The cast of “It’s a Wonderful Life 2” reassembled on stage at Celebration Covenant Church, a suburban megachurch north of Dallas. There were characters from a Victorian tableau, along with Frosty the Snowman, young ballerinas and children dressed as penguins. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus were there, too.

Then, entering from stage right, came “an adult Christ stripped down to his loincloth and smeared with Dracula blood, dragging a cross to center stage while being whipped by two centurion guards,” writes Stuever, in “Tinsel,” his open-a-vein study of Christmas in the American marketplace. “Here is where the Nativity, Dickens and Burl Ives collide head-on with Good Friday, as Jesus is crucified while everyone sings ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ ending on a long, noisy note: ‘newborn kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.’

“Then they freeze.

“Hold it for applause.”

The scene was achingly sincere and painfully bizarre, with holy images jammed into a pop framework next to crass materialism. For millions of Americans, this is the real Christmas.

“I wrote it in my notes, right there in that church,” said Stuever. “I wrote, ‘It’s Picasso.’ … I just couldn’t believe it.”

There is nothing new about a journalist “embedding” himself to experience life on the front lines. Rather than heading to Iraq, Stuever moved to the Bible Belt. He lived in Frisco, Texas, for six months in 2006, then made 12 short follow-up trips during the next two years.

The veteran Washington Post reporter convinced three families to let him see Christmas through their eyes, from the Back Friday craziness to the somber trashing of mountains of ripped wrapping paper. The book’s credo is voiced by Tammie Parnell, a 40-something business dynamo who decorates McMansions for women who are too busy to prepare for a Texas-sized Christmas.

“Fake is okay here,” she tells Stuever. “Diamond earrings. Christmas trees. If you want me to prove that fake is okay here, let’s you and I go to the Stonebriar Country Club pool one day and check everyone out.”

The bottom line? Most Americans say they want Bethlehem and the North Pole, but the truth is that they invest more time, energy and money at the North Pole. That’s fine with Stuever, who is openly gay and calls himself a “Christmas loser” — while wrestling with the lessons of his Jesuit education and the loss of his Catholic faith.

“A dip into even the most reverent inquiries by Bible scholars,” he argues, “easily leads to the conclusion that there was no actual manger scene in Bethlehem, no shepherds dropping by to see the baby, no star in the east, no Magi, no frankincense, no myrrh. … Many scholars have concluded, some more gently than others, that the Christmas story is intentionally fictive, written by the earliest, first-century evangelists to beef up Jesus’ street cred as a believable Jewish Messiah. Like any superhero, Christ needed an origin story rife with the drama, metaphors and the meaningful symbols of the era.”

Thus, “Tinsel” seeks the meaning of Christmas in the material world itself, in the blitz of shopping, in houses draped in high-voltage lights, in the complex joys and tensions of family life. Stuever argues that the binges of shopping and feasting are as ancient — and more significant today — than the rites of praying and believing.

For Stuever, Christmas is fake, but that’s fine because fake is all there is. He argues that millions of Americans struggle to find the “total moments” of nostalgia and joy that they seek at Christmas because they are not being honest about why they do what they do during the all-consuming dash to Dec. 25.

“It’s so easy to see all of the craziness on TV and say, ‘Oh, those poor, stupid people,’ ” he said. “But when you get down there in the middle of it with them and listen to what people are saying and try to feel what they are feeling, you realize that all of that wildness is not just about buying the new Wii at Best Buy. …

“It’s a religious experience for them, even though it couldn’t be more secular. They’re out there searching for transcendence, trying to find what they think is the magic of Christmas.”

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This formula worked in weeklong revivals and, when tried, it started working in regular Sunday services. Big preachers drew big crowds and created bigger and bigger churches. Then along came the big media, which helped create a youth culture that exploded out of the 1950s and into the cultural apocalypse that followed. Church leaders tagged along.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, we started drinking deep at the well of pop culture and we’ve been doing it ever since,” said church historian John Mark Yeats of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Tex. “The goal was to use all of that to reach the young. Evangelicals ended up with own youth subculture.”

Big churches created bigger stand-alone youth programs and then children’s programs wired to please these media-trained consumers. Youth programs developed their own music, education and preaching, all driven by the style and content of entertainment culture.

Then these young people became adults and began to build and operate their own churches, argue Yeats and his seminary colleague Thomas White, in their sobering book, “Franchising McChurch.” For churches that want to grow, the evolving approach to faith that White and Yeats call “theotainment” seems like the only game in town.

“Think of countless children’s ministries across the United States. … Most children’s Sunday schools quit reading and studying the Bible long ago. Instead, children view cartoon adaptations of the text along with numerous activities that keep them entertained while Mom and Dad worship without distraction,” argue White and Yeats, who have worked in local churches, as well as classrooms.

This strategy is cranked up another notch in youth ministries. In many communities, the “religiously oriented youth, savvy shoppers that they are, simply attend the church that has the greatest concentration of entertaining events. … If they buy into Christianity through entertainment, the show must go on to keep them engaged.”

This has been going on for decades, noted Yeats. The “Jesus rock” of the ’70s moved out of music festivals and into Sunday services. This created a “Contemporary Christian Music” industry that helped churches hip-hop from one cultural style to the next, while striving to find their stylistic niches — like stations on an FM radio dial. Sanctuaries turned into auditoriums and, finally, into theaters with semi-professional sound systems and the video screens preachers needed to display all of those DVD clips that connected with modern audiences.

That was the ’90s. Today’s megachurches offer members new options.

Grandmother may attend a service with hymns or — as Baby Boomers turn 60something — folk music or soft rock. Pre-teens will bop to Hanna-Montana-esque praise songs in their services, while the young people get harder rock. Over in the “video cafe,” evangelical Moms and Dads can sip their lattes while musicians build the right mood until its time for the sermon. That’s when the super-skilled preacher’s face appears on video monitors in all of the niche services at the same time.

This trend — multiple, niche services on one campus — requires changing the traditional meaning of words such as “worship,” “church” and “pastor.”

But it is one thing for a single megachurch to offer its members a “have it your way” approach to church life at one location, said Yeats. The next step is for the “McChurch” model to evolve into “McDenomination,” with the birth of national and even global chains of church franchises united, not by centuries of history and doctrine, but by the voice, face, beliefs and talents of a single preacher, backed by a team of multimedia professionals.

This trend is “very free market” and “also very American,” he said.

“In these franchise operations, you don’t say you’re a Southern Baptist or a Methodist or a Presbyterian or whatever,” Yeats explained. “No, you say you attend the local branch of so-and-so’s church. The whole thing is held together by one man. That’s the brand name, right there. …

“If your church joins one of these operations you get the video feed, you get the media, you get the music and, ultimately, you get to listen to the dynamic man himself, instead of your own sub-standard preacher. It’s a whole new way of doing church.”

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As any evangelical worth his or her salt knows, that question sounds like this: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Super aggressive believers prefer: “Are you saved? If you died tonight, would go to heaven or hell?”

Carter remembers replying: “I’m, yeah, actually I have.”

What happened next was strange. The young man was “visibly disappointed” and “wore a look of minor defeat” because he wouldn’t get to save a soul during this lunch period. He ate quickly and departed and, this is the crucial detail for Carter, they never spoke again.

The evangelist wasn’t looking for a friend or dialogue with a believer. He wanted to carve another notch on his Bible, using techniques learned during a soul-saving workshop. If his blunt approach offended strangers, or even strengthened their “Fundie-alert systems,” that was their problem, not his.

Every decade or so there are new, improved techniques for making these spiritual sales pitches, each backed with snappy catch phrases and, these days, with hot websites, books and videos. Then everything changes again a generation later, noted Carter. What you get are stacks of leftover “Left Behind” video games, “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, “emerging church” study guides and copies of “The Prayer of Jabez.”

It helps to know that Carter is himself an evangelical who is concerned about evangelism issues. As a journalist, the 39-year-old former U.S. Marine has worked for a number of conservative causes, including World Magazine, the Family Research Center and the presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. He recently finished helping build Culture11.com, a right-of-center forum for evangelicals, Catholics and mainline Protestants interested in discussing how religion, culture and politics mix in daily life.

That website’s future is uncertain, but before his recent departure Carter nailed a manifesto to that cyber-door — dissecting 10 fads that he believes are hurting evangelical organizations and churches. While most conservatives have been arguing about their political future, in the Barack Obama era, Carter decided to focus on faith issues.

It’s a list that will be puzzling to outsiders not fluent in evangelical lingo. The “Sinner’s Prayer, which reduces the quest for salvation to a short “magical incantation,” made the list, as did the emphasis on “premillennial dispensationalism” and other apocalyptic teachings in some churches.

Carter is also tired of long, improvised public prayers in which every other phrase contains the word “just,” as in, “We just want to thank you Lord.” He would like to hear more sermons focusing on the life of Jesus, as opposed to preachers and evangelists focusing on their own dramatic life “testimonies.” And while he is in favor of growing churches, Carter is worried that the “church growth movement” has evolved from a fad into a permanent fixture on the American scene.

“What most people call the church-growth movement is something that grew out of business principles, instead of growing — organically — out of the life of the church,” he said. “People started trying to figure out how they could change the church so they could get more people to come inside, rather than doing what the early church did, which was going outside the church and reaching people by actually getting to know them. …

“It’s like people started saying, ‘What kind of music do we need to play so that more people will join? What do we need to do to the preaching? What kind media can we add to the services?’ “

But the thread that runs through this online manifesto is that Carter is convinced that evangelicals need to spend less time striving to make quick conversions and more time training disciples who stay the course.

In the end, he said, techniques will not carry over from one generation to another.

“Part of the problem is that evangelicals really don’t have traditions,” said Carter. “Instead, we have these fads that are built on the strengths and talents of individual leaders. … But a real tradition can be handed on to anyone, from generation to generation. It’s hard to hand these evangelical fads down like that, so it seems like we’re always starting over. It’s hard to build something that really lasts.”

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Years later, industry insiders started talking about selling music online and it was deja vu all over again. The voice in his head said, “Fans will forgo CD art and packaging altogether? You seriously believe that?”

Swartzendruber also likes reading magazines he can hold in his hands, especially when it’s the one that he runs. But that’s changing, too. After 30 years of defining a subculture it helped create, CCM Magazine is facing its last press run. After April, it will appear online — period.

“On one level, this is just part of what is happening everywhere,” said the 40-year-old editor. “Lots of magazines are moving online. But there’s more to it this time and everybody knows it. This is part of even bigger changes in the whole Christian music business.”

For decades, CCM stood for “contemporary Christian music,” while executives debated precisely what that meant. It helps to know that Nashville is a place where judgments about the state of an artist’s career can be based on theology as well as sales.

In the beginning, CCM meant pop tunes that youth choirs could sing in church. But over time, some artists ventured into heavy metal and alternative rock, while others dug back into country and rhythm and blues.

During one identity crisis a decade ago, the Gospel Music Association — focusing on lyrics — struggled to establish criteria for its Dove Awards.

“Gospel music,” it proclaimed, “is music in any style whose lyric is: substantially based upon historically orthodox Christian truth contained in or derived from the Holy Bible; and/or an expression of worship of God or praise for His works; and/or testimony of relationship with God through Christ; and/or obviously prompted and informed by a Christian world view.”

Industry leaders predicted a bright future. They cited huge Soundscan sales numbers in 2001, but that included mainstream records — such as the “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack — that sold in Christian as well as mainstream stories.

Those numbers looked great, but a revolution was taking place backstage. Bands like P.O.D., Sixpence None the Richer, MercyMe, Chevelle, Switchfoot, The Fray, MXPX, Mute Math and others were jumping into the mainstream. Some artists ignored the CCM scene altogether or fought for their legal right to escape.

Realists could see several trends by 2003. The first was that sales were falling for the “adult contemporary” artists — such as Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant and Steven Curtis Chapman — whose success had defined the CCM industry. Meanwhile, sales were rising for Christians who reached the mainstream. And finally, Christian stores were selling truckloads of “modern worship” CDs containing the explicitly religious “praise music” that bands play Sunday after Sunday in megachurches across America.

When CCM asked its subscribers what they wanted to read, they requested more coverage of “artists in the mainstream” and “modern worship artists.” So Swartzendruber and his team redesigned their magazine last year, focusing on a wider spectrum of music and artists.

In a letter to readers, the editor stressed: “We’re going to start mixing indie and general market Christians in with those who have Christian label affiliation on a more regular basis. In other words, we’re going to stop perpetuating the myth that what is and what is not ‘Christian music’ is based on where the music is sold. (If you think that last sentence sounded confessional, you’re right.)”

The bottom line was that the old CCM label had become “out of date and marginalized.” So the editors changed the name to “Christ. Community. Music.”

But it was too late to save the magazine, in its old form. The work of redefining the familiar CCM label will continue online, said Swartzendruber, at an expanded CCMMagazine.com website that will include daily coverage, blogs, podcasts, digital music and other signs of the times.

“What we learned is that contemporary Christian music was perceived — by people in our subculture and people in the mainstream — as music made by Christians, for Christians,” he said. But what readers are saying now is, “We want to hear more about the artists of faith who are having an impact on our culture, not just artists who are preaching to the choir.”

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This will be tricky, because Christmas is what the 70-member staff at this megachurch calls a “federal” event. This means that these services will unite worshippers from the three radically different services that are held week after week at this booming congregation in Victorville, Calif., about 90 miles outside of Los Angeles.

“Christmas may be the only time when people want to hear traditional music, no matter what age they are,” said Crandall, the church’s 46-year-old “worship pastor” and the former drummer in a rock band called the Altar Boys. “Even kids who are totally into hard rock what to hear a few carols, which makes it easier to put together a service that pleases everybody. … We try to do the same thing during Holy Week and Easter.”

In recent decades, many churches have been shattered by the intergenerational strife that researchers call the “worship wars.” If you want to split a national church, change its teachings about sexuality or salvation. But if you want to split a local church, you toss the hymnal, hire a drummer, unleash the teen-agers or make some other musical change that rocks the pews.

But High Desert Church is the kind of church that has turned this equation around. Its goal is to build a multi-flock ministry that unapologetically offers all rock, all the time, but with bands that appeal to different packs of young people, as well as bands for believers from an earlier g-g-g-generation or two.

Now, this nondenominational flock is poised to become the poster church for this FM-radio-dial approach to worship, after being dissected in the hallowed pages of the New York Times.

“When you start a church, you don’t decide who you’re going to reach and then pick a music style,” senior pastor Tom Mercer told America’s newspaper of record. “You pick a music style, and that determines who’s going to come.”

On one level, the music divides this church. But on another level, the music is at the heart of worship services that create zones of comfort for people who have been raised in a culture in which consumers define themselves by their musical choices.

Thus, High Desert Church offers a “Classic” service for Baby Boomers and others who came of age during the “Jesus rock” explosion in the ’60s and ’70s. This service offers a softer brand of acoustic rock — think Byrds or the Eagles — that is easier on the delicate and even damaged ears of older worshippers, said Crandall.

Meanwhile, other musicians focus on the “Harbor” service for people between the ages of 30 and 50. It features the kind of soaring, inspiring rock that most people would associate with U2 and classic bands from the 1980s. Then the “Seven” service cranks things up another notch, with what Crandall described as a “dark” and “moody” mix of postmodern music for the young.

The bottom line: Church leaders use different technology to create different music for different generations who choose to attend different services.

The music unites and the music divides. The challenge for church leadership, Crandall said, is to unite these flocks around a common vision when doing evangelism and missions — primarily through 18-person cell groups that focus on fellowship and prayer. Then there are those “federal” events that take place several times a year.

There are still Protestant and even Roman Catholic churches that are trying to create “blended” worship services that appeal to all ages at the same time. “Blended” is the term used to describe a mix of traditional hymns and rock music, switching back and forth between a pipe organ and those electric guitars.

Their intentions are good, said Crandall, but the results are guaranteed to offend people whose musical tastes are simply not compatible. Thus, he believes that “blended” services drive people away rather than pulling them together.

“This is reality,” he said. “Everything is about the music. When you go to the mall, you can even tell what kind of people are supposed to be shopping in the different stores just by listening to the music that is playing. Can you imagine kids wanting to shop in a store that is playing the music that their parents listen to? No way.”

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“What happened before the Great Reformation, we all know,” said Phyllis Tickle, author of “God Talk in America” and two dozen books on faith and culture. “We know, for instance, that some sucker sailed west and west and west and didn’t fall off the dad gum thing. That was a serious blow.”

So Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and then a flat, neatly stacked universe flipped upside down. Soon, people were talking about nation states, the decline of landed gentry, the rise of a middle class and the invention of a printing press with movable type. Toss in a monk named Martin Luther and you’re talking Reformation — with a big “R” — followed by a Counter-Reformation.

Back up 500 years to 1054 and you have the Great Schism that separated Rome and from Eastern Orthodoxy. Back up another 500 years or so and you find the Fall of the Roman Empire. The transformative events of the first century A.D. speak for themselves.

Church leaders who can do the math should be looking over their shoulders about now, argued Tickle, speaking to clergy, educators and lay leaders at the recent National Youth Workers Convention in Atlanta.

After all, seismic changes have been rolling through Western culture for a century or more — from Charles Darwin to the World Wide Web and all points in between. The result is a whirlwind of spiritual trends and blends, with churches splintering into a dizzying variety of networks and affinity groups to create what scholars call the post-denominational age.

Tickle is ready to call this the “Great Emergence,” with a tip of her hat to the edgy flocks in the postmodern “emerging church movement.”

“Emerging or emergent Christianity is the new form of Christianity that will serve the whole of the Great Emergence in the same way that Protestantism served the Great Reformation,” she said, in a speech that mixed doses of academic content with the wit of a proud Episcopalian from the deeply Southern culture of Western Tennessee.

However, anyone who studies history knows that the birth of something new doesn’t mean the death of older forms of faith. The Vatican didn’t disappear after the Protestant Reformation.

This kind of revolution, said Tickle, doesn’t mean “any one of those forms of earlier Christianity ever ceases to be. It simply means that every time we have one of these great upheavals … whatever was the dominant form of Christianity loses its pride of place and gives way to something new. What’s giving way, right now, is Protestantism as you and I have always known it.”

It helps to think of dividing American Christianity, she said, into four basic streams — liturgical, Evangelical, Pentecostal-charismatic and old, mainline Protestant. The problem, of course, is that there are now charismatic Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as plenty of Evangelicals who are interested in liturgical worship and social justice. Conservative megachurches are being forced to compromise because of sobering changes in marriage and family life, while many progressive flocks are being blasted apart by conflicts over the same issues.

In other words, the lines are blurring between once distinct approaches to faith. Tickle is convinced that 60 percent of American Christians are worshipping in pews that have, to one degree or another, been touched by what is happening in all four camps. At the same time, each of the quadrants includes churches — perhaps 40 percent of this picture — that are determined to defend their unique traditions no matter what.

The truly “emerging churches” are the ones that are opening their doors at the heart of this changing matrix, she said. Their leaders are determined not to be sucked into what they call “inherited church” life and the institutional ties that bind. They are willing to shed dogma and rethink doctrine, in an attempt to tell the Christian story in a new way.

“These emergent folks are enthusiastically steering toward the middle and embracing the whole post-denominational world,” said Tickle. “We could end up with something like a new form of Pan-Protestantism. … It’s all kind of exciting and scary at the same time, but we can take some comfort in knowing that Christianity has been through this before.”

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How short do you have to make a Mass to appeal to parishioners who don’t want to get out of bed to go to Sunday Mass in the first place? Would more people attend if Mass was 40 minutes instead of 50?

“There are priests who can do a weekday Mass in about 22 minutes and the people know that father has left his car running out back and his golf clubs are in the trunk,” said Father John A. Valencheck of the Diocese of Cleveland.

“Sunday Mass is supposed to be different. I have trouble getting it done — I hate those words ‘getting it done’ — in less than 50 or 55 minutes. I don’t know how to do everything we’re supposed to do in less than that. ? But all of this should lead us back to a crucial question: What are we doing at Mass in the first place?”

The people who really have to watch the clock are the priests and lay leaders in the giant suburban parishes that surround America’s largest cities.

This is especially true in the Bible Belt, where the children of northern Catholics kneel next to increasing numbers of Hispanics and many Protestants who have converted to the ancient faith. Thus, the pews and parking lots are crowded, while a declining number of priests struggle to offer services that please the old and welcome the new.

But there’s another reason that many American Catholics want to edit and tweak their ancient rites. They know that Protestant megachurches offer rock-concert-quality mass media, ample parking, free babysitting, health clubs and every conceivable form of special programs for people of all ages, but especially the young.

Valencheck’s parish office recently received a postcard — addressed “Occupant” — from a megachurch promoting its free Starbucks coffee and Krispy Kreme Donuts.

It’s hard for Catholics to compete in this marketplace, he noted, in an essay entitled “Mass Marketing Mass” in the Adoremus Bulletin. The ultimate temptation is for priests to embrace the “bedrock assumption that the Mass is a painful event” and that they need to make major changes in order to survive.

“One solution is to make the Mass pass as quickly as possible, apparently on the assumption that the people who are there do not want to be there, so the object is to get them in and out before they can register the full measure of their boredom,” wrote Valencheck. “The focus of the Mass is now placed on those who do not want to be there.”

Then there are Catholics who are determined to make the Mass more entertaining. This can lead to sappy pop music, pseudo-megachurch media and priests who offer chatty sermonettes while presiding over liturgies that have been truncated until almost all of the ancient mysteries and traditions are gone.

The problem, Valencheck noted, is that an “entertaining innovation can too quickly become grating and we are right back to the problem of being boring.” And then there are efforts at popularization that veer close heresy, like the popular YouTube video of the Halloween costume Mass in a California parish that ended with the priest recessing out of the church — dressed as Barney the purple dinosaur.

It’s crucial, said Valencheck, that priests continue to have faith that parishioners and visitors will respond to an “old school” Mass that is offered with dignity, grace and, yes, a sense of quality. The details of the rite must be beautiful, so that they point to the mysteries that are beneath the surface.

“There is a way to carry a chalice that says, ‘This is just a cup and it really doesn’t matter if you pay attention or not,’ ” he said. “Then there is a way to carry it that says, ‘This is a chalice. Get down on your knees and meditate on that.’ …

“It’s like when you tell someone that you love them. You can just say the words. But there’s also a way to pause and look right in their eyes and tell them that you love them in a way that let’s them know you really mean it. There’s a way to give our words and our actions weight and gravitas. Priests have to remember that.”

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The leaders of this famous megachurch outside Chicago can be precise about this number because that is how many people had, at mid-week, visited WillowCreek.org and claimed seats in the 7,200-seat auditorium. A few solo seats remained.

“We don’t sell the tickets, of course,” said spokesperson Cally Parkinson. “Most people really like the E-Tickets. It’s convenient to know that you’ll have a seat and it helps us prepare for all of those people in the church and the parking lots.”

These 75-minute Christmas services began on Tuesday night and continued through the popular Christmas Eve triple-feature at 12:30, 3 and 5:30 p.m. This is, as Parkinson likes to say, the Super Bowl for this “seeker friendly” congregation.

Any way you look at it, 55,000 people is a big Christmas. Willow Creek’s leaders are used to that. They are not, however, used to handling a barrage of questions — primarily from journalists — about their decision not to hold a Christmas service on Christmas Sunday.

Many other big congregations decided to use the same strategy, which meant the “Churches Shut Doors on Christmas” headlines spread nationwide. The timing was perfect, in a year when the “Put Christ back in Christmas” debates were bigger and louder than ever in the public square.

“I think the whole Christmas wars story was being driven by TV talk shows and politics and we just turned into the next day’s story,” said Mark Ashton, who serves as “pastor of spiritual development” at Willow Creek. “Ironically, when all is said and done, this could turn into the biggest outreach event that we’ve ever done as a church.”

Willow Creek has, as a rule, never held services on Christmas Day, he explained. The exception came in 1994, which was the last time Christmas fell on a Sunday. After hosting the usual throngs in the pre-Christmas services, hardly anyone — which at Willow Creek means 1,000-plus people — returned that Christmas Sunday. This is serious, since it takes 1,000-plus people to operate the children’s ministries, youth groups, food services, bookstore operations and parking lots when the megachurch opens its doors on an ordinary Sunday.

Thus, Willow Creek’s leaders decided to create a 12-minute DVD this year containing a story — entitled “Emmanuel: God With Us” — about a young woman in Chicago struggling to understand the meaning of Christmas. The church produced 25,000 of the DVDs for home use by families on Sunday.

“We don’t think that we’re skipping worship on that Christmas Sunday,” said Ashton. “What we’re doing is decentralizing it. … We’re hoping to end up with 20,000 mini-services in homes in the Chicago area and all across America.”

The goal, for Willow Creek leaders, is finding a way to create the most “spiritual experiences” for the most people this Christmas, he said. It helps that most megachurches are not tied to the ancient traditions that steer other flocks.

In a statement released to critics, Willow Creek leaders explained that in their community, the “normal Christmas rhythm is to celebrate Christmas with a Christmas Eve church service, then spend Christmas Day with family and friends. Most nondenominational churches reflect this same pattern. Some liturgical churches, like the Episcopal or Catholic churches, are tied closely to a church calendar. They always celebrate Christmas Day as a high point on their calendar. So if they departed from this tradition, it would be a big change.”

In other words, Willow Creek remained true to its own goals and its own philosophy as a church. Keeping the doors closed on Christmas Day was not a change in a worship tradition — it was an expression of a modern reality.

“Our goal is to serve people in ways that make the most sense and have the most spiritual impact on their lives,” said Ashton. “It’s not just a matter of giving people what they want. It isn’t just consumerism. We challenge the socks off people with the messages they hear while they’re in our services. …

“But we also notice how people vote with their feet. We notice when they want to attend services and when they do not. We take that into account.”

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As the decades passed, some big Protestant churches began hiring orchestras and buying advertisements, creating a music-ministries arms race that pitted the Baptists against the Pentecostals and the Presbyterians against the Methodists. Some prosperous churches even began moving these performances on stage or outdoors, adding elaborate sets, costumes and lights.

But the leaders of these churches agreed on one thing — big Christmas events were supposed to be held on the Sunday before Christmas. Most of the faithful stayed home to fill their roles in the big shows in their churches and then hit the road.

“Going to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day was something the Catholics did and all the people in those other churches that followed the church calendar,” said John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College.

“For most Protestants, Christmas was about being with your family. Churches weren’t open on Christmas, but nobody thought much about it — unless Christmas fell on a Sunday. Then things could get complicated.”

This is precisely what happened this year, of course, when some of America’s largest evangelical churches made headlines by canceling their Sunday services on Christmas Day, urging the faithful to stay home with their families. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and many other news organizations said this was an ironic decision in a year when conservatives were attacking any merchants and government leaders who refused to “put Christ back in Christmas.”

It seemed, said Witvliet, that “part of the problem was that headline that everyone was using — ‘Churches Close On Christmas.’ That just seemed so counter-intuitive to people who have never really given much thought to the problems that churches have year after year trying to negotiate their Christmas schedules so that things work out for their families. …

“But this is old news. This problem has been getting worse for decades.”

Like it or not, the old Christmas traditions built on extended families and small, neighborhood churches have been shredded by decades of interstate highways, divorces, Thanksgiving shopping blitzes, mass media, secular parties and cheap airplane tickets.

Modern clergy find it hard to get the numbers to add up.

How is a church music minister going to handle a difficult Christmas cantata when only one or two tenors or sopranos remain in town? What are elementary-grade Sunday school leaders supposed to do when most of their Nativity pageant angels, shepherds and wise men have been air-lifted to distant zip codes to visit various grandparents or ski resorts?

Drastic times produce pragmatic pastors and priests. Thus, it has been a decade or two since most churches — Protestant and Catholic churches alike — began moving many of their Christmas festivities into mid-December and even earlier in an attempt to find gaps in the log-jammed calendars of their wandering members.

Those Christmas concerts that used to be scheduled for Sundays around Dec. 22 or 23 began drifting earlier and earlier in the month. At many churches, organizations and, especially, Christian schools the Christmas season is all but over by Dec. 15 or 16 or earlier. All that’s left is frantic shopping and the rites of travel, food, family, fellowship and television.

“At some point, the whole month of December turns into Christmas and people just do what they have to do to jam everything in there,” said Witvliet.

The only surprising part of this year’s megachurch Christmas controversy, he added, was that some influential Protestant churches decided to close their doors on a Sunday. After all, it is perfectly normal for Protestant churches not to gather for worship on the Feast of the Nativity, even though it is one of the most important holy days in Christian tradition.

And what about observing the traditional Christmas season itself, which begins on Dec. 25th and continues through Epiphany on Jan. 6th?

“Even talking about the traditional 12 days is like asking people to run uphill against everything that’s going on around them,” said Witvliet. “Most of what happens in the church today is, sadly, being driven by the calendar of the shopping mall. That’s how people order their lives.”

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That’s how the Baptist preacher ended up in St. Andrew Antiochian Orthodox Church in a cloud of incense, trying to figure out what the worshippers were chanting, why they rarely sat down and when the 9 o’clock service was going to end so that the 10 o’clock service could begin.

Everything was a mystery.

“When the main service ended they just kept going and had two more. …I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” said Moody. “It was the most in-your-face, retrograde old stuff you could imagine. What fascinated me was that this was the TOTAL antithesis of everything that is happening in the contemporary church.”

But he looked around and realized he wasn’t the only visitor in the multi-ethnic crowd. Afterwards, a cluster of ex-Methodists helped him get oriented. Moody had toured Orthodox churches in Jerusalem and elsewhere, but had never actually attended a service.

It was while he was driving home that he had a crazy idea.

During his Sunday adventures, Moody has seen his share of megachurches offering “seeker-friendly services” for media-soaked Americans. These are the ones with shiny auditoriums that seat 5,000 or so people, complete with rock-concert quality sound and lights. Many have been shaped by the work of consulting firms that specialize in church design and marketing.

Moody thought to himself: How would a church-growth professional critique the smells, bells and sacraments he had just witnessed?

Before long, he had written a satirical “Survival Guide” for an imaginary “St. Pachomius Byzantine Orthodox Church.”

The church’s name, for example, was simply not acceptable today.

Moody’s imaginary consultant was blunt: “Nobody — and I mean NOBODY — understands any part of your name. (I actually commissioned a survey.) Most assumed you were Jewish, others thought of a travel agency and one was sure ‘Byzantine’ was a link to al-Qaeda.

“My recommendation: Be bold! Embrace the third millennium! Take a new name, one derived from the old but in a clever sort of way. Our people suggest you utilize the word BOX: how about ‘p-BOX’? Edgy, isn’t it, but evocative and mysterious, as well. Remember how United States Steel Corporation became USXX? Brilliant: strong but subtle, distinctive and vague.”

The sanctuary would need a makeover, starting with the exit of all those “painted panels of old people.” Besides, the icons were taking up space that would be needed for large video screens for movie clips and pop-rock hymnody. The firm suggested replacing the incense with “some very nice potpourri planters in a selection of scents: Miracle Moonlight, Oceans of Peace and Farm Fresh Faith.”

The a cappella quartet of overweight male chanters would have to go, as well.

“Modern, younger people — those you must seek to appease, I mean, attract — are drawn toward drum sets and speakers,” he added. “Make them very visible, even if you actually utilize sound tracks (sample enclosed).”

And Holy Communion? Adding a Starbucks would be a better idea. If the church insisted on serving bread and wine at the altar, “research indicates that videos shown during the lag time are well received.”

The article was published in several Kentucky newspapers and then in the Christian Century, a mainline weekly. Moody was relieved to learn that Orthodox readers had gotten the joke and were rolling in the aisles. Well, some were rolling in the aisles. Many Orthodox Christians would not have aisles in which to roll, since their sanctuaries are traditionally built without the modern amenities called pews.

Then members of other churches began to respond. Moody hit a nerve with his backhanded tribute to a flock that was clinging to 2000 years worth of roots.

“You see, I was not making fun of the Orthodox,” he said. “I was making fun of the whole contemporary church scene. … There are people in all kinds of traditional churches who are being told, ‘If you don’t change, you’re going to die. If you don’t buy into the latest fads, you’re history.’ Ministers are under incredible pressure to strip away anything that’s connected to the past. Well, some people have had enough.”

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