Really I don’t know that I have the perfect answer to this debate, honestly, I don’t know if anyone does.
Churches try their best to “Christianize” this most wicked of holidays, but even the best attempts really fall short.
For years I grew up in the same church, every October the pastor would preach at least one sermon on Halloween and give out many materials explaining the Pagan roots to this Satanic night. I could probably recite to you in pretty good detail the origins, practices and history of this black day... but I will let you read another blog for that!
The fact is, even though I know all of that information and history, this holiday is still hard to know how to handle, exactly. For instance, at Southside, we would do a “harvest party” every year and just bless the community with a fun carnival, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a Christian church here in Newberg that has a “trunk-or-treat” in their parking lot, costumes encouraged...
Now the church I grew up in literally taught that if you celebrated Halloween at all, you were giving worship to Satan, intentional or not. The problem with that kind of thinking is, if you do ANYTHING on Halloween then you are giving worship to Satan, and that same church would have a “Harvest Party” every year, costumes not welcome... only thing was, inevitably someone would show up in a costume and we would carry on as if they were not. Now we never treated those folks different, we never acted as if a “persona non grata,” were amongst us, we were nice to everyone who came, fake blood and all. And, I think this seemed like a reasonable alternative.
Problem was, like it or not, we were having a party on Oct. 31. We could say that it was a Christian alternative, but as mentioned before, if you followed the logic, Satan would have been glad that we were having a Christian party on, “his day.” As a matter of fact, if you think it through, he would have been ecstatic that he got the church... THE CHURCH... to celebrate his BIG day.
So, I don’t know how much we should buy into this kind of black and white, all or nothing kind of theology. These are the kind of problems you get into when you have such thinking. Clearly, Halloween is an evil holiday that celebrates Satan, Death and the Occult. Not exactly the kind of thing we Christians want to be a part of celebrating.
For me, my ideas about Halloween began to change about 5 years ago when I took my first church over on the coast in Newport, Or.
My family and I were not going to celebrate Halloween... not until, that is, one of the single women in the neighborhood that we had been talking to about Jesus came by with her kid and asked if we would go along with them... we did. We walked the neighborhood with this single mom and shared LIFE with her. This was part of the bridge building and relationship building that lead to conversations about Jesus. This lady was into New Age Mysticism already... what she needed was to encounter Jesus and have her life changed. Now I am not certain, but I doubt the devil took much pleasure in THOSE activities.
Bottom line, as Christians we should NOT be celebrating the evil side of Halloween, as a matter of fact the scriptures tell us that all who hate God, love death. Prov. 8:36. What we need to focus on is, how can we:
- Be relevant to culture.
- Use this as an opportunity to show the goodness of God (Rom. 2:4)
This year we are looking at joining with some other Christians who will be giving away glow bracelets downtown during the annual trunk-or-treat on main street. The point is not to join in and look the same as everyone else, the point is to shine the light where the people are, not from behind the safe walls of a building, but out amongst the crowd. Jesus told us to be in the world but not of the world... it may be cliche but... “What WOULD Jesus Do?” What will you do? How will YOU light up the darkness in your little neighborhood?
Pastor Willy
