Christmas eve or not

I am still trying to decide whether we should have a Christmas Eve service at church this year or not. The church didn't have them when we arrived here some fourteen Christmases ago, but we started having them at some point, and have had ever since. This year seems a little different though. We've had quite a few people leave the church, which isn't all that unusual I guess, but they tried to cause as much damage as they could in doing so. So much so that of the people left, many have stepped back their involvement, and the rest of us are kind of just beat up and tired. So, on the one hand we just don't have a real "family" feel to our group at the moment. And I know there are some who say, "Well let's just go ahead and do it just to show them that they can't stop us." Which is true to some extent, but... at the same time, it still takes some amount of effort to pull it off, and I know who will get left with that. Plus, to be perfectly honest, I'm just really tired of doing things to only have a hand-full of people show up. I know it's not about the numbers, but it starts to wear on me after awhile, and it's really discouraging. I don't want to be discouraged anymore; especially at Christmas.

However, on the other hand, I know it shouldn't matter. We probably should just go ahead and do it. Even if there are only 5 or 10 of us here. I don't know. We were going to do this Readers Theatre thing, but it requires 11 different readers. We asked for volunteers and only 3 people have said they would help out. I'm sure I could guilt enough people into helping, and I know that a lot of people won't help unless they are asked personally, but... again... it's just really discouraging.

I actually made out two sets of bulletins and two sets of announcements for our Sunday gathering this morning. One set says we ARE having the Christmas Eve service, and the other set says we are NOT. I still can't decide. Ugh.

I guess the thing that bugs me the most isn't even the number of people - because we usually have quite a few people Christmas Eve... they just aren't people from our church. Mostly guests or visitors. Which is fine. I just wish we had more from our church community.

I don't know...