I’m often asked this and I have to admit that every year, as I grow, my answer changes. This year, for the first time, we are considering ‘doing’ Halloween. My oldest daughter (9) went from homeschool to ‘real’ school last year, and this is our first Halloween spent in a school. Subsequently we are actually coming into contact again with a great deal of unbelievers. It’s very sad to me that we’ve been so out of the world for so long.
See, not since I was active as a WIC volunteer and at La Leche League when my oldest was 1, have I taken part in any organized group of people of mixed faiths. I only started working last year, and it’s been from home. So, unlike most of you, I really only interacted with the believers at church and my own family. Therefore, I suffered from skewed view, based on the closeted world that I lived in. Of course, it created within me a different world than others who live in the real world deal with. I was hyper-conservative, probably much like the monks of the early church, who idealized their walk and the walks of the citizens they admonished, rather than living a godly existence IN the world.
So, for me, everything was a list of rules in which I could flog myself into greater submission to the Lord. Looking back, I can see that now, but at that time I was unwilling to bend to the fact that maybe heart issues were individual and not ‘across the board’. Halloween is one such heart issue.
It’s discussions, like this Halloween discussion at Challies right now, that led me to this decision a few months ago:
My encouragement to you today is to think and pray about this issue. I do not see Halloween as a great evangelistic occasion. I do not foresee it as a time when the people coming to your door are likely to be saved. But I do think it is a time that you can prove to your neighbors that you care about them, that you care about their children, and that you are glad to be in this world and this culture, even if you are not of this world or this culture. Halloween may serve as a bridge to the hearts of those who live around you who so desperately need a Savior.
I know I’m not going to lead anyone to Jesus on October 31. However, the people 2 doors down that we’ve never met, though we’ve lived here for 5 years, will get to see those ‘believers across the street with four kids’ on that night in a relaxed and cordial atmosphere. Will we touch their lives on Halloween? possibly, but probably not; However, we will open a door that has been closed for 5 years and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to plant a seed in the near future.
I planted, and Apollos watered, but God made it grow. 1 Corinthians 3:6 NIV
