THE nativity is a story that resists organisation: nothing about Bethlehem went to plan. The census was inconvenient, the accommodation inadequate, and the witnesses were the wrong sort of people. If there was a rota, it was in disarray; if there was a risk assessment, it failed. God arrived unannounced, without permissions or safeguarding checks; and the world has been trying to manage him ever since.
We like to think of the incarnation as serene and orchestrated, but scripture gives us something much messier. Mary and Joseph are displaced; the shepherds are startled out of their wits by angels interrupting the night shift. The first Christmas is far from being a well-run event: it’s more a holy interruption; and yet, in the disorder of Bethlehem, God chose to be born.
The contrast with our own religious culture is hard to miss. We are an anxious Church that wants every outcome planned and rehearsed, every risk mitigated, and every initiative evaluated. We measure discipleship in attendance graphs and “engagement metrics”. We produce strategies for mission, frameworks for renewal, and dashboards for faith, all the while forgetting that the child in the manger lay quietly outside our systems — unquantified, unmanageable, yet entirely sufficient.
THE danger is not organisation itself, but the illusion that we can manage mystery. God cannot be reduced to a project plan. “There was no room for them in the inn,” St Luke writes, and there is still little room for disorder in our ecclesial life. But God’s pattern has always been the same: he bypasses the managerial in favour of the miraculous.
The incarnation is not efficient: it is extravagant. Heaven empties itself into a feeding trough; the infinite becomes an infant. The economy of salvation runs at a loss by every earthly measure; yet, its yield is eternal life.
The Church, in her best moments, has always known this. Her saints and mystics, her poets and prophets, have recognised that holiness flourishes where control loosens. “God is not found in the noise of the world, but in humble stillness,” St John of the Cross said. Bethlehem is proof that God does not wait for ideal conditions. He arrives amid census chaos, political tension, and human exhaustion.
FOR those of us who work in or around the Church, this can be a hard lesson to re-learn. The pressures of institution and survival make management feel like ministry. Budgets must balance, safeguarding must hold, governance must function. These are not enemies of the gospel, but the scaffolding that allows it to stand. Yet, if they become the gospel, the scaffolding replaces the structure.
To lead as a Christian is to accept holy disorder, and to make space for grace to do what planning cannot. We are not called to manufacture outcomes, but to recognise epiphanies. The shepherds were not recruited: they were interrupted, and their training was a sky full of angels.
Perhaps the greatest quality of ministry is not competence, but attentiveness: the ability to notice when God arrives unannounced.
The nativity also rebukes our obsession with influence. The Kingdom did not begin in a palace, but in obscurity. The only publicity came from a single star. God could have chosen Rome, but he chose a backwater village. He did not choose priests or rulers, but the unnoticed poor. His strategy — if we can call it that — was proximity. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, not above us.
Christmas is, therefore, the great unmasking of managerial religion. It reminds us that the divine plan is ours not to manage, but to receive. The Church’s task is to create the conditions for wonder, not to control its arrival. We may prepare the manger, but we may not choreograph the birth.
AND perhaps this is the hardest truth of all? God does not need our efficiency: he asks for our availability. The miracle of Bethlehem is not that the world was ready, but that Mary said yes. Her consent changed history. The incarnation depends not on competence but on consent.
In an age of strategy and self-optimisation, that is a liberating thought. We are not managers of the divine: we are stewards of mystery. To stand at the crib is to rediscover that the Church’s power lies not in her systems, but in her surrender.
When the carols fade and the lights are packed away, the question remains: will we return to our dashboards, or to our knees? The Christ-child still lies outside the gates, where spreadsheets cannot reach. There, among the shepherds and the straw, the Church may yet remember how to wonder.
