top of page
Search

Using the Nativity Story to Reach Families Who've Heard It a Hundred Times

  • Writer: Glenn Fletcher
    Glenn Fletcher
  • Jul 29
  • 3 min read

✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦

There is a pastoral challenge that almost nobody talks about directly, but that almost every pastor faces in December:


The people in your congregation — the ones who have been coming to Christmas Eve services for thirty years, the ones who can recite Luke 2 from memory, the ones who have heard the nativity preached from every angle available to a human preacher — have developed a kind of protective familiarity with the story.


They're not resistant to it. They love it. But familiarity, unchecked, becomes a kind of distance. The story that should arrive with the force of the most significant event in human history instead arrives, for many deeply devoted Christians, as something comfortable and known and safe.


The theological content lands correctly. The emotional experience has been... smoothed.

This is not a failure of faith or commitment. It's a natural consequence of loving something for a long time. And it creates a genuine pastoral opportunity.


The Defamiliarization Problem

Literary critics have a term for what the best literature does to familiar subjects: defamiliarization. It's the technique of presenting something known in a way that makes it feel strange again — not alien, not distorted, but newly visible, as though you're seeing it for the first time even though you know it well.


The Christmas story is in constant need of defamiliarization for long-tenured church members. Not because the story itself becomes less true over time, but because the human perceptual apparatus becomes habituated to things it encounters repeatedly. We stop actually seeing what we look at constantly.


The pastor who can find a fresh angle on the nativity — a perspective that has not been used before, a voice that creates new access to a familiar story — is doing something genuinely valuable for their congregation. They're not changing the story. They're changing the angle of light so that the congregation can see it again.


That's what MARK! The Herald Angel does for the Christmas story. It creates a completely new point of entry — an angelic newspaper reporter with a journalist's skepticism and a grudging respect for facts — and positions the reader as a first-time witness to a story they know completely. The familiarity of the nativity, experienced through Mark's unfamiliar eyes, becomes surprising again.


Pastors who've used the book in Advent tell me consistently that their congregation arrived at the Christmas Eve service feeling like they were approaching the nativity with fresh eyes. The book had done the defamiliarization work before the sermon even started.

(story continues after ad)


Practical Strategies for Fresh Nativity Engagement

Beyond the congregational book approach, here are a few practical strategies that can help families who know the Christmas story well encounter it freshly:


Change the reading translation. If your family reads Luke 2 every Christmas from the same version, try The Message or a translation you've never used. The vocabulary change alone creates enough defamiliarization to make the familiar words feel newly interesting.


Read from a different character's perspective. Who in the nativity story is never given a voice? The innkeeper. The donkey, in some retellings. The other guests at the inn who had no idea what was happening in the stable behind the building. Give voice to a character who is usually silent and watch how the familiar story opens up.


Ask a question you've never asked before. What did Mary tell Joseph after the shepherds left? What did the shepherds say to each other on the walk back to their flocks? What did the innkeeper think when the shepherds showed up at his door? Genuine curiosity is a form of defamiliarization.


Let a new voice tell the story. Read a Christmas novel or novelette that you haven't encountered before — one that comes at the nativity from an angle you haven't tried. A fresh narrative voice, encountering the story with genuine enthusiasm, can transfer some of that enthusiasm to a reader who has lost the capacity to be surprised by what they know too well.


That's what I was trying to do with MARK! The Herald Angel. And based on what I've heard from the families and churches who've read it, I think it's working.


✦ Contact me about using MARK! The Herald Angel as a fresh entry point into the nativity for your

Comments

bottom of page