NIPAWIN — Bethlehem Live returned to the Nipawin Alliance Church this year, after taking a two year break.
“It’s back by popular demand, if you were,” said Joel Diamond, senior pastor with the Nipawin Alliance Church.“Why it’s kept going all these years is because they call up and they say ‘are you doing Bethlehem Live this year?’ So a couple of years we didn’t, we took a break, and it was like people were disappointed. So people keep it going.”
Feedback didn’t just bring it back but also influenced the production.
“This one has been reduced a little bit because we’ve had a lot of people coming through and the performance was about 30 minutes long and so now it’s just over 20 minutes long with some of the changes we’ve made,” Diamond said. “It’s just to try to get more people through because at times you could have an hour wait.”
One of the reasons the Alliance Church puts on the play is to tell people about Jesus’ birth.
“Not everybody knows the real reason for the season and so you’ll have people who understand Christmas to be about Santa Claus or giving gifts or Christmas trees. But it’s a time where we celebrate the birth of Christ, himself. So maybe not everybody understands that or maybe not the details to it, the importance to his birth. So that’s what we want to do here.”
Telling the story of the birth of Jesus isn’t the only reason.
“Also it’s about getting people into the festivity of the season. So we want to encourage people by it.”
The medium of visual arts is used so people remember.
“People tend to remember things when they’re impacted not only verbally but emotionally, sights sounds, all the senses,” Diamond said. “And so it can be a very good impact to a person in remembering what the point is. But also we live in a society that is very visual with entertainment with television and movies and everything, so acting is a way of communicating that message, I believe in a more powerful way.”
The Alliance Church rotates between two different plays.
“The other one we do is with the wise men and it’s recorded they went on a long journey to find the Messiah,” Diamond said. “It’s sort of the two stories we like to tell that give the importance of Jesus’ birth, not only his actual birth but also how it was recognized by leaders that came and went on this long journey to see the king that was born.”
This year the birth was chosen as the focus of the play for variety.
“If you tell the same story over and over it can be sort of done, so we want to encourage people to come back every year so we want to mix it up a little bit so we can tell the story a different way each year. Then also for our actors as well because once you’ve gone through the script two or three nights it’s nice to change it after a couple of years.”
The play was on Nov. 16 and 17.
For people that missed it this year Diamond suggested, “look for it next year”.
