Pastoral Care

The Incarnation Restores Belonging: Why Christmas Community Is Essential to Discipleship

Explore why the incarnation demands communal discipleship. Learn how churches can use Advent and Christmas to build relational foundations that prevent isolation.

FlockConnect

02 Dec 2025 — 11 min read

Photo by Jessica Fadel / Unsplash

The Word Became Flesh

God did not send doctrine; God sent a Son. The incarnation was not an abstract theological concept delivered in isolation but the embodied entrance of God into human community, history, and relationship. When churches reduce Christmas to individual piety or cultural celebration, they betray the incarnation's fundamental meaning: God chooses community. Modern churches that fail to build intentional belonging during Advent and Christmas miss the season's core discipleship power and lose members who are spiritually searching for exactly what churches are failing to provide: genuine community.

The Incarnation as the Model for Belonging

Christianity is fundamentally a religion of embodied community. God could have redeemed humanity through abstract decree; instead, God became flesh and dwelled among us. This is the scandal of the incarnation. God did not offer salvation from a distance but entered into proximity with human bodies, relationships, families, and communities.

Tim Keller writes extensively about the incarnation's implications for Christian community. The incarnation demonstrates that God values embodied, particular, local community so deeply that God became embodied and particular. God was born into a specific family, in a specific place, into specific relationships. This specificity is crucial. God did not distribute divine presence everywhere equally; God concentrated divine presence in one body, one family, one community at a specific moment in history.

Yet modern churches often miss this implication. We treat Christmas as a religious holiday primarily focused on internal spiritual experience ("finding the true meaning of Christmas," "reflecting on Jesus' birth in your heart") rather than as a call to embodied communal formation. We offer Christmas services where individuals sit in rows listening passively. We celebrate the incarnation without incarnating its reality: God entering into community demands that believers enter into community.

Francis Chan emphasizes that longing for God's presence is inseparable from longing for embodied togetherness. When Chan speaks of "desperate hunger for God's presence," he connects this hunger to the reality that God's presence is always mediated through community. We know God partly through Scripture, yes, and partly through personal experience, yes, but crucially, we know God through one another. This is the implication of the incarnation: God's presence in the world today is mediated through the church, the body of Christ.

Why Advent Is a Discipleship Crisis Point

Advent and Christmas represent a unique moment in the church calendar. These weeks are when the culture's narrative (materialism, family nostalgia, commercial festivity) most powerfully competes with the gospel narrative. Yet these same weeks are when people's hearts are most open to spiritual searching.

Researchers studying church involvement note a consistent pattern: members who feel connected and known during December are significantly more likely to remain active through the new year. Conversely, members who face December alone or within shallow relationships are at highest risk for post-holiday disengagement.

This is a discipleship crisis point because churches have extraordinary opportunity that most fail to leverage. The culture has primed people's hearts for spiritual reflection. Families gather, asking deep questions about meaning and belonging. Young people return home, reassessing their faith commitments. New people visit churches seeking community they sense is missing from their lives. All of these conditions create opportunity for churches to build relational foundations that last.

Yet most churches squander this opportunity. Instead of creating intensive relational spaces during Advent, churches add programs (Christmas concerts, special services, decorations). Instead of inviting people into vulnerability and genuine community, churches offer entertainment and tradition. Instead of seeing Advent as a relational formation moment, churches see it as a scheduling challenge.

The result: people leave churches on January 1st feeling more isolated than they did on November 1st. The season designed to celebrate God's entrance into community became a season exposing their lack of community.

Gavin Ortlund and the Incarnational Ethic

Gavin Ortlund has written and spoken extensively about what he calls "incarnational ethics." If God entered into embodied community and vulnerability, then Christians are called to do the same. We cannot worship an incarnate God and practice disembodied faith. We cannot celebrate that God became flesh while preferring spiritual experiences that avoid actual bodies, actual presence, actual community.

Ortlund applies this to how churches should function. An incarnational church looks like: leaders present in people's homes, pastors visiting the sick, church members knowing each other's actual struggles and hopes, vulnerability rather than performance. This is not sentimentality; it is the logical implication of incarnational theology.

During Advent and Christmas, churches have the opportunity to practice incarnational ethics more intensively than any other season. But this requires intentional structure and pastoral vision.

Anselm on Friendship as the Context for Discipleship

Medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury developed a theology of friendship that connects directly to incarnational community. For Anselm, friendship is not optional to spiritual formation; friendship is the container in which spiritual formation occurs.

Anselm's letters reveal the intensity and emotional richness he expected from Christian friendship. Friends were not merely people you cooperated with; friends were people you longed for, people whose presence shaped your spiritual development, people whose absence caused genuine grief. Anselm believed that spiritual growth required constant presence and radical vulnerability to one another.

The incarnation itself is, in Anselm's view, the ultimate act of friendship. God chooses to be vulnerable with humanity, to enter into genuine relationship, to be present in embodied form. This is what Anselm means by atonement: God entering into solidarity with human suffering and forming new relationship with creation.

When churches celebrate Christmas without creating the conditions for Anselmnian friendship (constant presence, vulnerability, spiritual accountability), they fail to embody what they're celebrating. They tell people that God became flesh to form deep relationships, then offer them shallow community.

Augustine and the City of God Gathered in Anticipation

Augustine developed a theology of the church as the "city of God" gathering together in anticipation of God's final kingdom. This gathering is not optional to faith; it is the very substance of faith. To believe in God is to believe in God's purposes for community. To follow Christ is to follow Christ into community.

Augustine observed that believers are shaped by the communities they gather with and the stories those communities tell. The church gathers repeatedly (in Augustine's context, daily or nearly daily) to rehearse the gospel story, to remind one another of God's purposes, to hear Scripture read and interpreted, to participate in practices that form Christian identity.

Advent is a season when this Augustinian vision becomes most powerful. The entire church calendar focuses on one story: God is coming. God will be born. God will dwell with us. This repeated narrative, rehearsed communally week after week, shapes Christian imagination and hope. But only if people are actually gathering, actually hearing the story together, actually being formed by shared anticipation.

When members experience Advent in isolation (watching online, reading devotionals alone, celebrating Christmas in nuclear family privacy), they miss the Augustinian reality: faith is formed through gathering, through hearing God's story told in community, through watching how others embody hope.

Practical Discipleship Strategies for Incarnational Christmas

Christmas Small Groups with Relational Focus

Rather than adding another Christmas program to the church calendar, invite existing small groups to use Advent and Christmas as a focused discipleship season. Instead of studying a new topic, use these weeks for relational formation. Structure meetings around questions like:

Where are you experiencing longing this season?
Who knows the real you, not just the version you project?
What does belonging feel like for you?
How is God inviting you into deeper community?

These questions create space for vulnerability. Members learn that Advent is not primarily about personal spiritual achievement but about discovering who is known and who is alone, and beginning to change that reality.

Incarnational Servant Projects

The incarnation was God serving humanity, entering into our need, becoming vulnerable to human suffering. Churches can embody this during Advent through intensive servant projects:

Organize caroling not as entertainment but as relational outreach (follow up with each person visited)
Create a "Christmas practical help" team that does home repairs, yard work, meal prep for isolated members
Visit nursing homes not for performances but for genuine relationship
Connect with homeless populations through ongoing relationship, not one-time charity

These projects accomplish two things: they serve people who are isolated or struggling, and they form the servants themselves in incarnational theology. Members begin to embody what they celebrate: God entering into human need with vulnerable presence.

Advent Intergenerational Mentoring

Assign each younger person or family a mentor family for Advent. The mentor family invites them to:

Attend Advent gatherings together
Serve together on a Christmas project
Share a meal and conversation about spiritual longings
Process what belonging means

This simple practice creates the conditions for discipleship. Young people see faith embodied in mentor families. Mentor families experience the joy and meaning of guiding others. Relational bonds form that prevent isolation.

Incarnational Hospitality Events

Rather than church Christmas parties, create hospitality-based gatherings:

Weekly Advent dinners in homes (rotating between families)
Church-wide Christmas Eve gathering focused on vulnerability and longing rather than celebration
Small group homes for isolated members during Christmas Day
Intentional inclusion of single people, divorced people, people without family nearby

These gatherings signal that the church is committed to actual embodied presence during the most culturally isolating season.

Relational Mapping During Advent

Create a system to track who is genuinely connected during Advent. Use data to identify:

Who is participating in communal Advent practices?
Who is serving alongside others?
Who appears isolated despite attending church?
Who is new and has no relational network yet?

Once identified, pastoral staff and trained leaders reach out personally: "I noticed you're with us but not yet connected to a small group/serving team/relational community. Can I help change that? Where could you belong?"

This data-informed relational care is incarnational. It says: "You are seen. Your isolation is noticed. You matter." It embodies the incarnation's core message: God sees, God enters into proximity, God forms relationship.

Christmas Story Retellings as Community Formation

Rather than emphasizing personal reflection on the Christmas story, create communal storytelling events:

Invite church members to share how they've experienced God's incarnational love in their lives
Gather in candlelit spaces to listen to these stories
Discuss how God's entrance into community challenges how we do community

This transforms the Christmas story from abstract theology into lived reality. Members hear how God has been embodied in their church's actual history. Faith becomes concrete and relational rather than conceptual.

Why This Matters for Post-Holiday Retention

Research on church attendance shows a consistent pattern: members who are in relational community (small groups, serving teams, mentoring relationships, vulnerable friendships) remain active even during low-motivation seasons. Members who attend services but lack embodied relationships drift quickly when life circumstances change or when church excitement decreases.

Advent and Christmas are precisely when churches can either build these relational foundations or expose their absence. Members who experience genuine belonging during this season carry that belonging into January. Members who feel isolated during December often do not return in January.

The discipleship implication is clear: Advent is not a time to add programs; it is a time to intensify relational community formation. Churches that use these weeks to build belonging will see significantly different patterns of retention and spiritual growth.

The Role of Pastoral Leadership in Incarnational Advent

None of this happens without pastoral leadership that sees Advent as a discipleship moment, not just a seasonal program. Pastors must:

Vision cast about what incarnational community means
Equip leaders to facilitate vulnerability and relational formation
Remove competing programs that distract from relational focus
Track relational data and ensure pastoral follow-up with isolated members
Model vulnerability and embodied presence themselves

Pastors who hide in their offices during Advent, even while programs happen, undermine incarnational theology. Pastors who show up in homes, in small groups, at servant projects, in moments of vulnerability model what incarnational faith looks like.

This requires time and intentional structure. Many pastors feel overwhelmed during December; adding relational focus seems impossible. Yet the alternative is clear: without intentional relational focus, pastors will spend January and February dealing with the attrition they could have prevented in December.

FAQ: Incarnation, Community, and Christmas Discipleship

Q1: What does incarnational theology demand of churches during Advent?

If God became flesh and entered into community, then churches must do the same: create conditions for embodied presence, vulnerable relationship, and genuine belonging. Incarnational theology demands more than intellectual assent to Christmas truth; it demands actual community formation.

Q2: Why is Advent a discipleship crisis point?

People's hearts are spiritually open during Advent in ways they are not during other seasons. The culture emphasizes family, connection, and meaning. Yet many churches lack the relational infrastructure to welcome people into genuine community. This mismatch leaves people spiritually searching but relationally isolated.

Q3: How does Anselm's theology of friendship apply to church community during Christmas?

Anselm believed friendship is the container for spiritual growth. Christian friendship requires constant presence, vulnerability, and relational accountability. Christmas is when churches can most easily gather people into this kind of friendship, if they structure for it intentionally.

Q4: What is the difference between Christmas programs and Christmas discipleship?

Programs entertain and occupy time. Discipleship forms people through relational encounter. Programs can happen without community; discipleship cannot. Churches that prioritize programs over relational formation miss Christmas's discipleship potential.

Q5: How can churches track relational connection during Advent?

Monitor attendance at communal Advent practices, serving projects, and small group gatherings. Track who participates and who is absent. Follow up personally with isolated members. See who is known and who is unknown in the community.

Q6: Why do members often leave churches in January?

Members who feel isolated during December often conclude that the church lacks genuine community. January is when they act on that conclusion. Conversely, members who experience authentic belonging during Advent carry that belonging into the new year.

Q7: How does incarnational theology change how pastors view their role during Advent?

Pastors shift from program managers to relational leaders. Instead of coordinating events, pastors focus on ensuring every member is known and included in genuine community. This requires visibility, presence, and relational follow-up.

Q8: What if our church already feels overwhelmed by December programming?

Remove programs that do not create relational formation. Replace them with simpler practices designed for community: shared meals, small group Advent studies, serving projects, mentoring relationships. Fewer, more intentional practices build belonging better than numerous programs.

The FlockConnect Opportunity: Seeing Relational Need During Advent

Pastors enter Advent with genuine desire to see every member, to notice who is isolated, to ensure no one faces the season alone. But without systems, this intention becomes impossible. The church grows busier while relational visibility decreases.

FlockConnect changes this. The tool shows pastors:

Who is participating in Advent practices and who is not?
Who is serving alongside others and who remains unconnected?
Which members have gone unseen for extended periods?
Which new people lack relational networks?
Which isolated members are highest risk for post-holiday attrition?

With this visibility, pastors can act. They can personally invite isolated members into community. They can ensure that Advent becomes a season of relational formation, not isolation.

The incarnation was God choosing embodied visibility over abstract distance. Modern tools like FlockConnect simply enable pastors to do the same: see relational need, enter into proximity, form community. This is incarnational ministry made practical.

Conclusion: Advent as the Gateway to Discipleship

Advent is not a seasonal distraction from the church's true work. Advent is the work. These weeks are when churches either build relational foundations that last or fail to build them. The stakes are high: members who feel known and belonging during Advent remain active. Members who feel isolated drift away.

The incarnation teaches that God entered into vulnerability, embodied community, and relational intimacy. Churches that celebrate this while maintaining relational distance or isolation betray what they celebrate. Churches that use Advent as a season of intensive community formation embody incarnational theology and build disciples who last.

Gavin Ortlund reminds us that incarnational theology demands incarnational ethics. Augustine shows us that faith is formed through repeated gathering and shared narrative. Anselm teaches that friendship is the container for spiritual growth. Francis Chan insists that longing for God is inseparable from longing for embodied community. Tim Keller grounds it all in the incarnation: God showing us what community looks like by entering into actual community.

The question churches face this Advent is not whether they can afford to prioritize relational community formation. The question is whether they can afford not to. The weeks from November through January determine whether members will be present on February 1st. Advent is the opportunity. Discipleship is the goal. Community is the means.

Start Building Incarnational Community

Advent is the perfect season to begin tracking relational connection and ensuring no member faces the holidays alone. FlockConnect helps pastors see relational need and implement intentional pastoral care.

Start your 14-day free trial at flockconnect.com today. See what it looks like to have visibility into your congregation's relational health during your church's most critical season.