Christmas 2006

Christmas this year had several components: church in Nanjing, church in Shanghai, and student dramas and PowerPoint presentations. St. Paul Church's activities for Christmas included a Saturday night candlelight service, Sunday morning special English Christmas worship service, Christmas Eve special music service, and Christmas day service. All of these services, plus the regular Chinese worship services were in Chinese, only the Sunday morning English service was in English. The total attendance at these services was around 12,000 persons, many, if not most, were young people. I sang in the English choir for the Saturday and Sunday evening services and was one of several Scripture readers for the English Sunday morning worship. Below are photos showing Christmas Eve at the church. Several of my students from last year arrived early enough to get inside the sanctuary before the program began. After 5 p.m., there were no more seats there, and then the overflow building filled up. After that, people were allowed to wait in line and could go in as others came out. I had several students in that line and I chatted with them while they waited. They did finally get inside. The first program was from 7-9 p.m., after which the program was repeated. People stood in line, up and down the street, for several hours. Below are photos from Christmas Eve.

On Christmas day, a friend and I traveled by train to Shanghai to attend JingLing Church's Christmas music program. There is nothing quite like the Christmas programs of Shanghai churches, and the best, musically, is understood to be JingLing Church. This is a pure worship experience. They presented their program four nights and probably one afternoon, for two hours each time, and always with dedication and intense focus. This evening was even more special, because the choirs from two branch congregations joined the main choir, which was already a combined choir from the church's several services. There were over 100 members of the choir, plus a small orchestra. My friend and I took an early morning train back to Nanjing on Tuesday, to be in class that afternoon. The two elderly women with me in the photo below are two of four sisters whom I knew from my earliest years in Shanghai. Two have gone on to be with the Lord, but these two godly women remain. These four sisters never married, dedicating their lives to God and serving him in music and teaching for many years.

This fall, the culture classes studied Ancient Greek culture, Ancient Roman culture, and the Bible as primary sources for Western language and culture. As a project for the Bible unit, my 175 students, in four classes, wrote and presented a drama or a PowerPoint or a combination. Some were straightforward dramas based on the basic outline I provided; others presented the drama in the form of a newscast, interviewing Mary and Joseph, shepherds, and wise men for their versions of the story; others chose to do PowerPoint presentations, using animated pictures and text, with music for effect. Below are some photos from those presentations.

These were the basic elements of Christmas 2006. It was a good year, I think, personally and professionally.