Sometimes, adding a few tight harmonies is all it takes to give an audience a new perspective on the Christmas story.

That’s been the case at Immanuel Lutheran Church, which will play host to its third annual Jazz Nativity Sunday night.

“It brings fresh life to the music and the stories they know and have heard,” says Geoff Wilcken, the church’s music director. “The songs can become so automatic and taken for granted.”

The concert, at 7:30 p.m., brings together the church’s contemporary choir with the community-based jazz group Glass Coffee Table. It intersperses biblical readings with the jazz arrangements of traditional carols such as “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “What Child is This?” and “Away in a Manger.”

“It’s wonderful and fun music,” says Wilcken, who arranges music for both groups and directs the church choir. “It puts a different little sheen on the carols we know. It brings the story in a way that’s out of a super-traditional context enough to bring attention to it.”

The Jazz Nativity is a highlight of the year for Glass Coffee Table, which has been around for more than four years. The five-member ensemble rehearses four hours a week year-round and performs at a variety of occasions, including nursing home events, dinners and conventions.

“It’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” says Linda Kelly, a vocal jazz fan who sings tenor. “We’re not going to be hitting the big time, but we really enjoy it.”

Andy Siler, a member of the contemporary chorus at the church, 2104 Bob Billings Parkway, says the music is not easy to learn.

“You have to get the original rhythm out of your head,” he says.

But he says audiences like a change of pace for the songs.

“They work in jazz as well as any of the old standards that have been set to jazz,” he says. “I’m a little old to have decided this was absolutely the way to go, but it sounds good to me.”

Wilcken says there’s nothing that inherently binds jazz music to Christmas music. But he notes that many Christmas carols are set to popular tunes of previous centuries.

Geoff Wilcken, Lawrence, right, leads Glass Coffee Table with a vocal bass line during Saturday's rehearsal at Immanuel Lutheran Church, 2104 Bob Billings Parkway.

“We’ve had great response to the Jazz Nativity in the congregation,” he says, noting that many in the audience aren’t affiliated with the church. “There are plenty of folks here for whom jazz was their pop music, and there are plenty of people here who remember and love jazz, and love to hear it again.”

Groups like Glass Coffee Table are becoming a rare breed. He says it will take popular events like the Jazz Nativity to keep the music form alive.

“It’s certainly a form of music, if it wants to have a future, that it will have to make that future,” Wilcken says. “It’s a musical style or form that, in some ways, people are only going to love if they’re exposed to it. We’re doing work to expose them. Nobody’s going to do it for us.”