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    Making Room Leader Guide: Sharing the Love of Christmas
    Making Room Leader Guide: Sharing the Love of Christmas
    Making Room Leader Guide: Sharing the Love of Christmas
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    Making Room Leader Guide: Sharing the Love of Christmas

    By Ed Robb

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    About this ebook

    Often our Advent preparations have an inward focus as we prepare for the significance of God breaking into our world through the birth of the Christ child. But in a closer examination of the Advent story, we quickly learn that the focus of the coming of the newborn king is outward.


    In this book and Advent study, Dr. Ed Robb explores the warmth of welcome at Christmas following interactions with Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the magi. Just as Jesus made room in God’s kingdom for a host of people that society wanted to leave on the margins, beginning with the appearance of the shepherds, we too should be asking ourselves who we can make room for this Christmas.


    Perhaps it is to the people in your community, or the newly immigrated family in town that doesn’t speak your language. Or maybe it’s the next-door neighbor who just settled in from yet another corporate move? The story of Christ’s birth encourages us to widen our borders and increase our sense of community—and make room for others.



    The Leader Guide contains everything needed to guide a group through the four-week study including session plans, activities, and discussion questions, as well as multiple format options.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2020
    ISBN9781791006402
    Making Room Leader Guide: Sharing the Love of Christmas
    Author

    Ed Robb

    Dr. Ed Robb is Senior Pastor at The Woodlands UMC in Houston, Texas. Serving the church for more than forty years, his vision and leadership have led the church to become one of the fastest growing churches in Methodism, with over 14,000 members. He is the author of The Wonder of Christmas, Under Wraps, and Mountaintop Moments. He and his wife, Beverly, have three adult children.

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      Book preview

      Making Room Leader Guide - Ed Robb

      INTRODUCTION

      Advent is a season of hope or a season of darkness; perhaps it is both simultaneously. The church has for generations observed Advent as a time to prepare our hearts and lives to receive the gift of a vulnerable infant, Immanuel, who is the personification of God’s love. For some, it is a time of excitement and joy as they prepare to see friends and family. Many enjoy decorating their homes, choosing the right Christmas gifts for others, or volunteering to help serve meals for those who could use a warm dinner served by kind people.

      For others, Advent is a time of disappointment, bad memories, or loneliness. The darkening days of December in the northern hemisphere further cast their mood into shadows.

      It is also sometimes the forgotten season. Church activities and retail establishments beckon us to go directly to Christmas Day, taking away the opportunity to contemplate and consider what the coming of Christ really means to our own lives and to the world.

      This Leader Guide is designed to be used with the Advent study Making Room: Sharing the Love of Christmas by Ed Robb. Reverend Robb is senior pastor of The Woodlands United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas. Serving the church for more than forty years, his vision and leadership have led the church to become one of the fastest growing churches in Methodism, with more than fourteen thousand members. He has helped Christians deepen their celebrations of Christmas through his books The Wonder of Christmas: Once You Believe, Anything Is Possible (Abingdon Press, 2016) and Under Wraps: The Gift We Never Expected (Abingdon Press, 2014). He has also inspired Christians through his book Mountaintop Moments: Meeting God in the High Places (Abingdon Press, 2019), which connects personal mountaintop experiences in our spiritual life with the mountains in the Old and New Testaments and the events related to those sacred places. He and his wife, Beverley, have three adult children.

      Robb’s thoughtful observations about how God moves through the ancient story of Christmas and our present experiences help us reclaim this soulful season. Making Room points us to the light, hospitality, and love of God in the Scripture stories that prepare us for Jesus’s birth. Recalling beloved memories of childhood Sundays spent at his grandparents’ small, rural Methodist congregation—characterized by sumptuous meals in the church fellowship hall, loving members who helped one another with the complications that arise in everyone’s lives, and members who cared about and knew all the children in the congregation—Robb sheds light on the Christmas story themes of loving our neighbors, welcoming strangers, inviting people into our circles of relationships, and guiding others into the loving community of God and God’s people. Some research has suggested that Americans are isolated, lonely, and hungry for friends, while neighbors barely know each other. Did Mary and Joseph, who traveled a long way to Bethlehem for the census, feel the same way when they entered a crowded town where there were no guest rooms available?

      After Jesus’s birth, the Holy Family found that they had to welcome strangers, even at that difficult time. Lowly shepherds and stately magi visited the family in their meager shelter. Robb sees in this a model of welcoming strangers and, in so doing, meeting others who would be their friends and supporters.

      Part of welcoming others is to leave a light on, showing them where they might find shelter, warmth, and a meal. In a world where the darkness of violence, oppression, and greed threatens to overwhelm lives, offering the love of God sheds a light that vanquishes the darkness. The star that pointed others to the place of

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