Are you bored of your church’s Christmas play? I mean, it’s always the same thing every year. You know the story. Mary (typically played by that one girl in the church who all the little girls and boys look up to) and Joseph (typically played by either a guy that’s the male equivalent of the above girl, or a different guy each year, each one more ridiculous and unknowledgeable than his predecessor) go to Nazareth for the census. There’s no room in the inn so they stay in the stable with the animals. Mary pops out her baby and lays him in the manger. Three wise men bring baby Jesus gifts. Then everything is great and the play is over.

That’s not how it is at St. John Lutheran Church here in Kendallville. Every Christmas for the past three years its youth group, which is my youth group, has put on a play, which is written by Nick Hayden, a local author and one of the youth group’s leaders. Each play has been kookier than the last. The first year we performed a play about a man who was putting on a Christmas pageant, but the pageant, unfortunately, was a disaster. The entire thing ended with a nice lesson about Christmas joy and how messed up things had gotten since the original Christmas.

Last year our youth group put together a crazy sci-fi play. The play started with a little boy wanting his mom to read him a bedtime story. His mom was going to read him the Christmas story, but he didn’t want that. He wanted space ships and aliens and such. His mom ended up reading him the story he wanted, which included aliens, mutants, corrupt governments, and death. All these elements were used to create a sci-fi version of the Christmas story to tell the story in a whole new light.

This year we have the privilege of putting on another play: The Empty Stage! This one is, essentially, a bad episode of Doctor Who. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll give you a brief synopsis. Ready? Here it comes…Everyone in the play dies. Okay, that was a pretty big spoiler. If you want a longer synopsis, read the next paragraph. If you want to come see the play and don’t want to spoil anything else, skip down to the last paragraph.

The play opens with a girl (played by East Noble freshman Kyra Warren) and a boy (played by East Noble sophomore Michael Lehman) arguing about the Christmas story. The girl decides that she doesn’t want Jesus in the Christmas story, which creates some problems throughout the play. The two characters end up traveling around time, arriving at different biblical Old Testament stories and experiencing the effects of a world without Jesus. The boy and girl eventually return to the present—a present without Jesus, that is. The play and its unrealistic happenings finally make sense in the ending as the events of the final scenes unfold. That’s the best summary I can give you without spoiling too much.

If this play peaked your interest, come to St. John Lutheran Church (301 S Oak St here in Kendallville) on December 4th. The play starts at 7:00 PM and should be done sometime around 7:30 PM. Admission is free, and everyone who comes is guaranteed to laugh and see what a world would mean without Christmas and, ultimately, Jesus.