Whatever Happened to Evening Services?

One thing that I never understand is the opening prayer that goes like this, “We pray for those who legitimately can not be with us”. Who cares if it is legitimate or not? Shouldn’t we pray for them either way?

As far as evening service our church of 50-60 usually gets half or more returning for the evening service. I would prefer an afternoon service personally since I work 6 day weeks most of the year and would like the evening to rest. Plus the few afternoon services that I have attended seem to lend themselves well to fellowship. Also in my case I tend to be more alert in the afternoon than in the evening.

Our Church meets in a school so we wouldn’t really be able to have an evening church service. However, almost half of church’s city groups meet in people’s homes on Sunday night. Our church places a high value on these small groups. If you are to be a member at our church, you need to be regularly attending both the Sunday Morning church service as well as regularly participate in a city group.

[Jay]

I was talking with a friend about this yesterday - we have a Sunday night service that is usually sparse in attendance (anywhere from 1 - 8 people; we run about 150 on Sun. AM), and I think that a large portion of it is that many people in our area are commuting and working in the NYC area and they’re simply exhausted by the end of the week (leading to the desire to ‘crash’ and finish the football game on Sunday, as Darrell noted) instead of mentally ‘gearing up’ to go back out to church (with the kids, as Greg Linscott noted) for a 6 PM service that lasts one hour. My personal work schedule starts when I leave the house before 7 and ends when I get home anywhere from 6:45 to as late as 8:30, depending. This excludes outliers like when we did a IT infrastructure upgrade in the office and I was home at 11 or cabling work that had to be done on Saturday. By the time we do all the other ‘home stuff’ on a weeknight and catch-up on Saturday, all I really want to do most Sunday afternoons is sleep!

I understand the rationale behind a Sunday night service, but I’m not sure that it serves its’ purpose anymore and think that Sunday afternoon services might be better for where I attend instead of trying to keep Sunday night alive.

I am not as hard-line on this as I used to be. However, I would still ask someone who presented the situation you describe to at least do some thinking. What they are saying is their schedule is too full and something has to give. In this picture, they have decided that part of their time with the family of God is what falls at the bottom of the totem pole. If life is too full, my finding has always been that there are still personal items making it on to the list. I am always reminded of Haggai - “Thus says the LORD of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord. Then the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, Is it time for you to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” (1:2-4) Like I said, I am not as hard-line about this as I used to be. We are not under the law, and Sunday is not the Sabbath. But I do think there are some things to think about. My pastor has always said we start preparing for the Lord’s Day on Saturday. When we had a Christian school, we did not play games late on Saturday. Kids had to be home by a set time, even if we had to forfeit to make it happen.

Feeling thankful for the folks at our church. We regularly have 75 percent of our morning crowd back on Sunday evening, sometimes more, for a service that runs anywhere from 1 1/2 hours or longer and usually I am waiting after the service for another hour before the last person leaves. We have several individuals who are traveling 30 minutes or longer to church. Sunday evening service is much the same as Sunday morning, four congregational songs, a psalm and a full-length expositional sermon. We do intersperse testimonies and read one of our missionary letters on Sunday evening. We do not collect an offering on Sunday evening! Perhaps that is the secret! :)

On occasion we will have a special Sunday where we have a meal after the morning service and then an afternoon service. I enjoy the change of pace on these Sundays but they are usually not as well attended by the church family as our regular evening service.

I’m not opposed to evening services in places where it has been that way and serves a purpose. In planting churches you have to ask different questions with different resources. We pay $1500 a month for a morning service? Should/can we pay that for an evening service or is the place even available? No! & No!

For the past 4 years we as a new church plant have been meeting at 4:00 pm due to lack of morning space available. Then we got involved in two other church plants which met in the morning. Now we have located morning space and begin morning services June 1st in West Philly. I work fulltime and am looking forward to rich morning worship with serious expositional preaching and freedom on Sunday afternoon/evening for fellowship, hospitality, family time, or relaxation. We have small groups (Grace Groups) during the week. At this time we are not interested or able to do two Sunday services for the same people or for half of the ones who come for the first service.

I do wonder if for those who drive great distances twice on Sunday to attend church it might be time to look at planting another church (or at least have some way of connecting during the week in small groups). Either way, whether or not to have an evening service will depend on many factors and we should avoid making assumptions about why others should or don’t.

Chip, I appreciated the admonition/encouragement. Malachi is a book I spent a lot of time in a few weeks ago, and that verse was the source of quite a bit of mediation. :)

I think, though, that living and working in and around the NYC area is so much different from just about anywhere else. It used to be that the area around us supported its own industry and commercial areas, and jobs were easier to find and much closer to home. Now, if you’re going to live where we do, you almost have to either be a dual income family or someone is going to have to work in NYC / Westchester / Danbury - because that’s where the jobs are. Our county is insanely expensive to live in (with Westchester County being notoriously worse), so just making ends meet is a major difficulty. I heard that from a woman two weeks ago who is probably pulling down more than six figures with her husband. NY is a very, very challenging place to try and ‘make it’, and moving out of state is not an option for me (long story) due to the high taxes on just about anything they can think to tax. Gas, for example, is almost .40/gallon more than NJ is in just state taxes. Sales tax is almost 9%, and I don’t even know what the outrageous property taxes are.

In any case, I was remarking to my friend that while my pastor knows how much things have changed, I don’t know that he really ‘gets’ it. The whole social fabric is different from when he first arrived, and that’s why I think Darrell’s suggestion is a good one. Even our Elder was telling me that he skips Sun. nights some times just because he gets up for work at 4:00 AM every day and has in bed by 8 or 9 PM just to keep functioning.

It’s not a matter of desire - if I could, I would be at every Sun. night service, and everyone that knows me personally knows that - it’s a matter of balancing rest, time with my family (that I don’t often get), and supporting the church or fellowshipping with other believers. For example, a couple of weeks ago I really wanted to attend a Sunday night service and my wife looked me in the eyes and said, “Jay, you’re becoming a grouch to live with because you’re so exhausted.” So what’s the right choice in that situation?

Jay, you really have 150 people on Sunday morning and only 1-8 on Sunday evenings? That’s not a church service; that’s a small group! If that’s the case, as Greg Linscott pointed out, the people have made it abundantly clear what they think of the Sunday evening service, no less so than if you had held a congregational vote on it.

I am trying to emphasize the difference between the different services in my church:

• Sunday School is very practical. We’re wrapping up a series on evangelism - how to share the Gospel, what is the Gospel, etc. I emphasize interaction and discussion.
• Sunday Morning is both evangelistic and edifying for believers. The Gospel is always preached]
• Sunday Afternoon is very focused on the Christian life. I did a series about how to grow in Christ. We’re marching through Ecclesiastes now, and we’re learning about the value of eternal things vice temporal.
• Wednesday is a Bible Study. I REALLY emphasize interaction here. Folks are free to interrupt to ask questions. We follow rabbit trails. I had a 35 min lesson last night on the Holy Spirit and our prayer life that stretched to 1 hr because we talked for over 20 mins on what the Holy Spirit’s role was in the life of an OT believer!

I think we need to make an effort to make the services have different goals. Encourage interaction and do something different. The thought of sitting passively and zoning out for 40 mins might not seem like that much fun. If we break out a whiteboard, coffee and donuts and just talk through an issue and explore the Scripture together, it may be better. Dever’s book The Deliberate Church talks about this. I thought he made some real good points.

Greg Long wrote:

Jay, you really have 150 people on Sunday morning and only 1-8 on Sunday evenings? That’s not a church service; that’s a small group!

It is interesting how perspective can change things!

My last church:

• 130-ish on Sunday Mornings
• 75-ish on Sunday Evenings
• 50-ish on Wednesdays

My current church:

• 35+ on Sunday Mornings
• 20-25 on Sunday Afternoons
• 8-10 on Wednesdays

In many big churches, my little country church might qualify as a “small group” in it’s best service!

Let me introduce you to a Christian family. dad and Mom both work full-time jobs. They regularly attend Sunday School, Sunday services (morning and evening), and Wednesday night Prayer Meeting. Each church meeting is essentially the same: congregational singing with a preacher/teacher leader. The family have some brief moments to interact with other Christians before and after services but crave more interaction with others. The church responds by introducing a men’s and a women’s meetings that involve a member of the church staff presenting a devotional in a sort of mini church service. Dad and Mom have thought of just getting some friends together at their home for prayer, discipleship, and fellowship but finding time in their already busy schedules is difficult; plus the they have heard that, in some cases, groups of church people meeting without pastoral oversight or permission has created problems.

Personally, the community group model provides an opportunity for fellowship, discipleship, and edification that is more accessible than a Sunday night service.

I am familiar with only one church that had similar attendance figures for Sunday am, Sunday PM, and mid-week services. Coincidentally they also were professional distributors of a “motivation by guilt” franchise.