Christmas in the Message Movement
William Branham simultaneously called Christmas “the sun god’s birthday” and preached annual Christmas-day services for fifteen years. His followers today inherit the contradiction — and Message-believing churches now hold three completely different positions on whether to celebrate it.
The Message movement teaches that William Branham was “Branham for this age” — a definitive voice whose recorded sermons contain God’s guidance for believers today. Christmas is a small, concrete test of that claim. After 60+ years of preaching from the same Branham sermons, what does the movement actually teach about whether to celebrate it?
Three things happen at once. Some pastors teach Christmas is pagan and must not be celebrated. Other pastors hold annual Christmas-day services with carols, candlelight, and concerts. A third group declares it a matter of “Christian liberty” and tells members to decide for themselves. Every position cites Branham. Every position can find Branham quotes that support it. The contradiction is real, and it goes back to Branham himself.
This article documents that contradiction in the speakers’ own words. Every quote below is a verified excerpt from a sermon transcript, with the source file path linked so any reader can read the surrounding context for themselves.
Branham's annual Christmas sermons include 49-1225 ("The Deity Of Jesus Christ"), 58-1221M ("Where Is He, King Of The Jews"), 58-1228 ("Why Little Bethlehem"), 60-1225 ("God's Wrapped Gift"), 61-1224 ("Sirs, We Would See Jesus"), and 63-1214 ("Why Little Bethlehem"). In some of those very same sermons — most strikingly 61-1224, preached on Christmas Eve at his own tabernacle — he simultaneously condemned December 25 as the Roman sun god's birthday and acknowledged he had hung Christmas stockings as a child. He never resolved the tension between his stated theology and his actual practice.
These pastors are leaning on the Branham quotes shown in the previous section that condemned Christmas — but they typically omit Branham's own annual Christmas-day services and his statements like "I like that one thing about Christmas." Their congregations get a one-sided picture of what Branham actually taught.
Cloverdale Bibleway (BC, Canada), one of the most prominent Message-believing congregations, has preached on Christmas Day for at least twenty consecutive years — a tradition explicitly continuing what Branham did. Love Divine Fellowship (Doug Baker) preaches a multi-part annual "The Christ Of Christmas" sermon series.
This is often the position taken by ministers who privately decline to celebrate but publicly refuse to bind their congregations. Tim Pruitt of Evening Light Tabernacle is the clearest example: in the same sermon where he says "we should never celebrate Christmas" (above), he also describes giving every family in his church a booklet of Branham's Christmas quotes "so they could just decide for themselves what to do." Pastor Jesse Smith of Bride of Christ Fellowship has built an entire teaching arc on this framing, citing Colossians 2:16–17 explicitly.
Across the 99 active text-content channels in the corpus (Dec 1 – Jan 5 season window, all dates and languages), 95 channels (95%) mention Christmas / Navidad / Noël during the season, and 73 channels (73%) explicitly say “Merry Christmas” / “Feliz Navidad” / “Joyeux Noël” from the pulpit. The largest celebrators by raw count include Spirit and Truth Tabernacle (17 season sermons saying Merry Christmas), Spoken Word Church (16), Cloverdale Bibleway (15), Bible Believers Church (14), Full Gospel Lighthouse Tabernacle (14), Peniel Tabernacle (11), Cedar Hills – Church of the Cross (11), Good Shepherd Fellowship (11), Shekinah Tabernacle (10), Word of Life Tabernacle (9), and Bride of Christ Fellowship (9). Genuinely silent churches — those with December sermons but zero Christmas mention in any language — are limited to two: Malachi Four Tabernacle (5 December sermons, 246 total — Spanish-language, never mentions navidad) and Deception Watch (2 December sermons, 8 total). Every other active channel in the entire corpus references the holiday.
This is not a peripheral issue. Christmas is a yearly, public, family-shaping observance — the kind of question on which a movement built around a "definitive prophet for this age" should have a definitive answer. After 60+ years of preaching from the same recorded sermons, Message-believing congregations still cannot agree. The contradiction is downstream of the contradiction in Branham's own teaching.