A season of Dreams - Christmas 2020

A Season to Dream When Everything Feels on Hold

Christmas 2020 was not the Christmas anyone had planned. Lockdowns, restrictions, cancelled gatherings — for many people, the dreams they had been carrying felt like they had been put on indefinite pause. And yet, right in the middle of all that disruption, Crowd Church held its very first Christmas live stream, built around a theme that felt both bold and necessary: a season to dream.

The choice was deliberate. As Matt Edmundson explained during the service, "there's a lot of things about dreaming around the Christmas story. There's a lot of references in the Bible to dreams around the Christmas story and the birth of Jesus, and also it's relevant for right now in this season that we're going through."

It turns out the Christmas story is packed with dreams — literal ones, not just aspirational ones. And buried in those stories is a message about what happens when ordinary people dare to trust God with the uncertain, the uncomfortable, and the downright terrifying.

The Man Nobody Talks About

Guest speaker Phil Watson took a slightly unexpected angle. Rather than focusing on Mary or the shepherds or the wise men, he zeroed in on Joseph — a figure who, as Phil pointed out, "gets a little bit of a mention in the Bible, and most people have" largely overlooked him.

Joseph is fascinating precisely because he is so ordinary. He was not a king or a prophet. He was a carpenter from a small town, engaged to a young woman, getting on with life. And then everything changed. His fiancee was pregnant, and the child was not his.

Phil's background gave him a unique lens on this story. As a foster carer for over a decade, he understood something about what it means to step into a parenting role that was not part of the original plan. He and his wife Helena started fostering after she asked him a simple question: "Have you ever thought about fostering?" His honest answer was no.

When a Tree Changes Everything

Phil shared a story about one of the first children they fostered — a three-and-a-half-year-old boy he called K. The boy arrived with very limited speech and almost no experience of the world outside his home. He did not know about TV characters. He did not know how to eat off a plate with a fork.

One day, Phil took him to Sefton Park in Liverpool. The boy kept pointing and saying, "What that? What that?" Phil looked around, trying to work out what had caught his attention. It was a tree. Not an unusual tree. Just an ordinary tree in an ordinary park.

"I realised he was pointing at a tree. It wasn't an interesting tree. It was a regular tree... and I went, this is a tree." The boy touched the bark for the first time, feeling the texture under his fingers. "Tree, tree," he repeated.

Phil's voice carried the weight of that moment. "This kid has not been out and about much. He's never seen a tree. What else is going to be a shock to him?"

That encounter — a small child discovering bark for the first time — became a picture of something much bigger. So many people move through the world without ever really seeing what is around them, without experiencing the wonder that is available.

Orphans Are Everywhere

Phil then drew a thread through popular culture that most people would never have noticed. "When I say orphans, I mean kids that can't live with their mum and dad. They're absolutely everywhere."

Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Superman. Spider-Man. Almost every Disney princess. Little Orphan Annie. Anne of Green Gables. Even John Lennon, who grew up just around the corner from where Phil was filming on Penny Lane. Lennon's story, Phil noted, was "absolutely heartbreaking" — raised by Auntie Mimi after both parents proved unable or unwilling to care for him.

The theme of the orphan, the outsider, the one who needs someone to step in, runs through our stories because it runs through our reality. And it runs through the Bible too. Moses in his basket. The repeated instruction to care for "the orphan, the widow, the refugee, the immigrant — anybody marginalised, anybody on the edge of society."

Joseph's Dream and Ours

This is where Joseph enters the picture. He received a dream — literally, an angelic visitation while he slept — asking him to do something that made no sense by the world's standards. Take Mary as his wife. Raise a child that was not biologically his. Step into a role he had not asked for.

Joseph could have walked away. The cultural norms of his day would have supported that decision entirely. Instead, he chose to trust what he had been told, even though it must have felt terrifying and isolating. He became, in a very real sense, a foster father to Jesus.

Phil made the connection gently but clearly. Every child who cannot live with their birth parents needs someone willing to step in, to say yes to a dream that might feel inconvenient or frightening. Joseph modelled that willingness centuries before the modern foster care system existed.

When Dreams Come With Disruption

The service itself was a picture of imperfection. Half the pre-recorded videos had no sound. The technical setup kept glitching. Sally's knock-knock jokes fell apart because she and Matt could not get the timing right over a remote connection. Matt ended up wearing a novelty Christmas tie that Sally had magically "transported" to him through the screen.

None of it was polished, and that was rather the point. Dreams do not arrive in neat packages. The Christmas story itself was messy — an unplanned pregnancy, a long journey, a birth in a stable because there was no room anywhere else. God seems to specialise in working through imperfect circumstances.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

Phil's talk was not just about fostering, though that call was genuine and heartfelt. It was about a wider principle: that God's dreams for us often arrive disguised as disruption.

2020 had disrupted everything. Plans were cancelled. Routines were shattered. For many people, the question was whether to simply wait for normal to return or to look for what God might be doing in the middle of the chaos.

Joseph did not wait for perfect conditions. He acted on what he had been given, in the circumstances he found himself in. He said yes to a dream that looked nothing like what he had originally planned for his life, and through that yes, the most significant story in human history unfolded.

The Invitation

The season to dream is not about having everything figured out. It is not about waiting until conditions are perfect. It is about being willing to respond to what God puts in front of you, even when — especially when — it does not match your expectations.

Phil put it well with his observation about fostering: a young woman who had grown up in care asked a room full of potential foster carers, "Could you be the family, the household, that could look after someone like me, who is invariably scared, lonely, worried, terrified?" That question changed everything for Phil and Helena.

Sometimes the dream that changes your life is not the one you would have chosen. It is the one that chooses you.

What dream have you been putting on hold? And what might happen if you stopped waiting for the right moment and simply said yes?