Presentation of "The land which outlawed Christmas"

Last night the audience for the "Waldweihnacht" agreed to come into a different world where Christmas was outlawed, to find a missing explorer from "The society for exploration, discovery and intergalactic travel". It’s always comforting when an audience responds in a way you hoped.

Despite a last-minute rain shower, which seemed to have taken up residence until I emailed a prayer request for better weather to our prayer team, the show ran more or less as planned. The audience were clearly impressed by the extensive preparations in the church hall. So was I: the team had created a “press centre” complete with video projections, telephones and satellite images of the route. Afterwards they were ushered through a portal into the “Other world”, found the explorer hiding behind a bush, gate crashed a customs agent, survived an ambush from an outlaw, who turned out to be quite friendly, and went on to confront the king so the people could celebrate Christmas again. So far, most of the feedback we had was positive.

Considering the scale of what we were doing, very little went wrong, which was largely due to your prayers, the effectiveness of our stage manager, and the flexibility of the team. Sometimes when there was an unforeseen change team members communicated and responded with hardly a word being said. In the same way the whole team simply got to work after the evening was over, washed all the cups from the hot drinks (In Germany disposable cups are very rare) and spent an hour breaking down the set in the church hall and cleaning the remains of the evening away.

Of course there were things that could have worked better, and which we will need to change in future. But we’ve made a good piece of theatre, which a lot of people enjoyed, and which had a fairly clear gospel message; we’ve seen relationships between team members improve and deepen and saw many of them stretched and growing in their skill. We’ve learned a lot about having theatre over a wide area, -the whole route was well over 1km long- and what sort of organisation is required next time.

And there will be a next time. Watch this space…