Prestonwood Baptist Comes to Town: Church Worships to Flying Santa Claus Song

In 2022, Prestonwood Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch in Texas, put on a Christmas performance featuring none other than a flying Santa Claus. In what was supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Christ, the sanctuary became a theater for holiday theatrics, complete with Santa soaring through the air like a scene from a theme park show.

The sanctuary, which is meant for the worship of God, was transformed into a spectacle designed to entertain crowds and elicit applause. The humility of Christ’s incarnation—a story that has stood for millennia as the most profound demonstration of God’s love—was overshadowed by a performance more befitting of a shopping mall holiday event.

Fast forward to 2024, and churches like Champion Forest Baptist Church, as seen in the video clip below, are scrambling to emulate Prestonwood’s model. In their bid for cultural relevance, they, too, have introduced flying Santas into their Christmas services, reducing the miraculous story of the God-man taking on flesh to an afterthought in a glitzy production.