As you may have read in my last post, our church has just started a second worship service. At our current site, that pretty much maxes out Sunday morning. If we fill both services (about 300 people total if nearly every seat is full), we’ll be looking for new, creative ways to make room for people who need God in their lives.
The traditional way would be to buy land and build a new facility. That would be very cool, but land and construction costs have both skyrocketed. God could still make it possible, of course, but I think we need to consider alternatives too.
One alternative would be to offer worship at another site – a school, hotel banquet room, who knows?
That’s what a lot of new church plants do. But we’d have to swim upstream in our culture. Large churches have convinced Christians that going to church is about finding a place that meets all of your needs and then being served by it. If we decided to meet in a gym, cafeteria, or banquet room, we’d need a large crew of missionaries! People would need to set up and take down all of the chairs, set up the Sunday School classrooms, set up and tear down all of the sound and multimedia equipment, haul it all in from the trailer and put it all back, as well as the usual requirements for musicians, greeters, child care providers, children’s teachers, etc.
I wonder if our congregation is ready to be missionaries? But maybe this is just what we need. And then, once we understand that – like Jesus – our role is to serve rather than to be served, then God can provide us with a beautiful facility. Perhaps only then we could make full use of it.
It’s a bit like Little Caesar’s pizza. If one worship service is good, two should be better, right? Should be easy. You just set a new time and do everything twice, right? Maybe in a different style?
Well, the church I pastor has just started a second worship service. It’s been a long, complicated experience.
Change is always hard for people, and many of the people at Trinity have been there for many years. But as it turns out, it’s been tough for some much newer people too – including me. Don’t get me wrong, starting a new service was the right thing to do, and starting a new service in a new style was also the right thing to do. But it’s been tough!
Our worship space was packed full at 150 people (with even our “simulcast” worship cafe in another room full). Parking was tough to find (down the street, of course), the seats people like toward the back of the room were all full. It was crowded! But when we started the new service, we started having a bit more than half of that count at each service. Part of what made worship feel so good was a room packed with people worshiping God. The energy was great. With 90 people in each service, it feels much lower energy. I hadn’t counted on that. 2-1/2 years ago, we had 70 people in worship, but that was a long time ago. It’s been over 100 for some time now, and that’s really different.
Also, we have brought on a new staff person who is quite simply excellent. But he does things differently than the music director who ran music at our blended service. The congregation and musicians need to be brought along more slowly than we anticipated. Part of my job will be affirming our new contemporary music director while working with him to lead the congregation from where we were to where we are going. We’ll also need to develop new systems to make sure that job responsibilities are clear and everyone gets the information they need.
I’ll share more with you as we move along on this.
It’s very exciting, since we now have room for new people again. The two worship styles should appeal to different people too and let us reach more people with the Good News of God’s love and support for them. I’m sure I’ll grow in the process too.
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