I don't know about you, but Christmas always seems to sneak up on me around here. We're beginning to plan for our Christmas services, and it's always a bit of a challenge to come up with a service that has the right mix of contemporary and traditional Christmas music. Our church does three worship services every Sunday, one traditional and two contemporary, but when it comes to Christmas, we usually try to blend the services more than normal.

Part of the reason is that people have certain expectations concerning Christmas music--the traditional carols are, well, traditional. We try to update some of the arrangements for a more contemporary feel, but my guess is that at Christmas time, people who would normally prefer contemporary worship are a bit more tolerant of more traditional styling. But the fact is that most of the people who attend our church regularly attend one of the contemporary services, so we have to bear that in mind when we put our Christmas worship services together.

I've put a planning team together for this year's Christmas services that includes members of our traditional worship team and our contemporary worship team, and I'm hopeful that together we'll be able to come up with something great.

What's your church doing this year?