Yesterday Horizon Community Church was closed. Yes closed. We did not have any services this past weekend. Why? Well for the past several years, at least as long as I have been on staff, we have taken the Sunday off between Christmas and New Year's Day. It is a time of rest for the staff and the volunteers at the church. Would it have been possible for us to have church yesterday? Of course it is. If we did have church yesterday it would have been up to the standards of every other weekend. The same level of excellence would have been the benchmark and nothing less would have been acceptable.
I know that there were quite of few churches like us who took this past weekend off. I also know of many churches that had services this past weekend. Some of those were abbreviated services or instead of doing all 3 services on Sunday they chose to do 1 instead. What did your church do? Was it the same as usual? Was the same level of excellence executed?
Am I glad that we took this past Sunday off? Yes I am. Did we miss an opportunity for new families to visit? Yes we did. Why do I think it is a good idea? It is a small reminder to our community that they to need to rest. In fact, we may have had more people think about church in our community because we didn't have it than if we did yesterday. It's like Chick-fil-a and why they are closed on Sundays. It is simply a reminder to be still.
I took the opportunity and spent it with my family. A nice morning where the boys and I played together. We ate together. We had time to relax as a family. Thank you Horizon for believing in resting.
December 29, 2008
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5 Responses to "Ministry Monday: The Church is Closed?"We had full weekend programming.
For us, that means: 4 services (1 Sat, 3 Sun), senior pastor preaching, full staff, and a large number of visitors.
We make it a point to tell our regular attenders to use the weekend to rest and spend time with family (many of them came to one of our 4 Christmas eve services).
Our hope is that those checking us out on Christmas eve (our normal weekend attendance is 1200... we had 2350 on Christmas eve) will come back. This year, many of them did. I understand why some churches take this last weekend off. But, I would never want to work at any of those churches.
Never say never . . .
We had a full programming weekend, with Senior Pastor teaching in all 3 morning services. Full children's ministry...everything.
Except one big problem. 100% of my college student volunteers were out-of-town; about 1/3 of all my other volunteers were out-of-town, and our overall attendance numbers were WAYYYY down. It is always the least programmed weekend of the year for us, because I know that we won't have many kids and even fewer volunteers. What does that spell for Children's Ministry? Movies and Popcorn. And we can all do better than that.
We had normal weekend services- 1 Saturday and 2 Sunday. Children's programming was scaled back a bit--the Christmas lessons in our curriculum for k-3rd are mainly video based for large group, and we used Stars of Christmas for 4th and 5th grades. Our attendance was actually at the high end of what it's been for the past month, and we had at least tripple the number of friends visiting with kids than we normally do (and they weren't out of town friends). Our adult services had the high school pastor teach, which ended up being a blessing because 5 high school kids who have never been to church showed up because one of them suggested, "Hey, we should go to church today." It was great for them to hear the guy who would be their pastor teach.
I think it would be amazing to have a weekend off to just rest... but I can't picture our church ever doing that. The weekend before Christmas we had a snow and ice storm, the town was warned not to drive, and we still had church. Only 50 adults and 8 kids for the first service compared to the normal 500 adults and 150 kids for that service. I didn't make it in because of the ice, so I guess I still did get a restful weekend!
rephrasing for Jessica's sake ;)
"...I understand why some churches take this last weekend off. But, at this point in my life, I would not want to work at any of those churches."
Again, I understand why churches take the weekend off. I would rather them take it off than spend the morning doing movies and popcorn... even though I LOVE popcorn!
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