Friday, May 02, 2008
A while ago a pastor friend of mine in VA emailed me and asked my advice concerning whether or not I thought his church should start a Saturday night service. Lots of pastors routinely weigh whether or not this is a good move, and rightly so. Here’s what I told him:
Vince,
If you call me on my cell I can talk a lot faster than I can type, but in a nutshell here was our experience:
1. We surveyed pastors for one full year about Saturday night services and decided to launch one in December of 2005. We killed it in April of 06, four and a half months later.
2. The service was reaching 150 people (we ran 800+ in the other three), but 95% of them were CCV transfers from Sunday morning to Saturday night. Of those people who switched services well over 1/3 of them STILL came to Sunday morning.
3. We cast vision for one year, recruited a massive team of incredible volunteers to pull it off, and sunk $ into direct-mail and signs to advertise it. We gave it EVERYTHING WE HAD.
4. Everyone told us that if you are going to be successful you had to offer the IDENTICAL programs you offer on Sunday mornings, so we offered a full kid’s and teen program identical to our Sunday service. Everything was the same.
5. Personally I hated life more during the four months we did Saturday night services than any other time during our church's six year history. It robbed a day from my work week because we made Monday a mandatory day off. Saturdays with my family were gone. Over. Outta here. I had to cut out of everything at noon. That one service began to trap staff and volunteer families into the internal orbit of the church like a black hole. My personal evangelism began to suffer. We gave staff weekends off to compensate for their weekends being completely ripped off from them, but then we noticed a severe lack of continuity between programming and the overall quality of the services and kids' programs. Everything suffered: The quality of our programs; the morale of our staff and volunteers; my overall attitude toward the church.
6. If I had seen measurable data that showed the Saturday night service was a killer outreach venue I would have given it much, much longer to play out, but we couldn't see any progress toward that goal, so it became a HUGE relief to our staff when one day I stood up before everyone and said, "Guys, does anyone else besides me think this Saturday night service was a really stupid idea?"
7. The decision to launch a Saturday night service was one of my worst decisions made here at CCV. My decision to kill it was one of my best.
8. We have adopted Andy Stanley's philosophy here: Never, as long as we have other viable alternatives, will we ever have a Saturday night service. The value we have on caring for our staff and volunteers takes precedence over adding a few more people to our aggregate worship attendance.
Brian
Should We Start A Saturday Night Service?
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4 comments:
Yes, some do come to Sunday morning as well. However:
I willingly go to Saturday Night because, like you, my Saturdays are packed. In the evening I can go to church, unwind, go to a late dinner with friends, and then actually sabbath on Sunday. Getting up as early, if not earlier then I would have to for the work week just to get to church and having to get up early on Saturday does not lead to much rest.
Saturday night should attract a certain subset of the population. We have a 20 to 30 something crowd that makes about 90 percent of our group. We have the single parent, and two parent households with 1 to 3 kids who have soccer practice, games, shopping and everything else that needs done. re-emphasizing for them that it truly is O.K. to take a day off and relax is truly important. Adding another frantic activity to the day set aside for rest messes with the sacred rhythm that God has intended for us.
I agree, it is not for all churches. Churches with an older population probably would not fair well.
Real Christians go to Church on Sunday morning.
Sunday is the first day of the week which is The Lord's Day, not Saturday.
I'm just curious how going to church on Sunday mornings as opposed to any other day of the week makes you a "real Christian"?
As far as "The Lord's Day", is that not everyday?
The seventh day is the day of rest. Which calendar are you looking at? One that goes from Mon.- Sun., or one that goes from Sun. - Sat.?
I could keep going, but I'm going to stop now.
As far as Sat. vs. Sun., personally I don't care either way. If I am getting to go to church, worship with fellow believers, and leave feeling better than I did when I walked in, who cares if it's on Saturday night or Sunday morning??
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