Faith Works 8-23-24

Faith Works 8-23-24
Jeff Gill

Why should I attend a worship service?
___


Summer is, I hate to tell you, coming to an end.

You can define it as to astronomical phenomena, or by the academic calendar as most do; if you want to insist summer isn't over until Labor Day evening, feel free!

Christmas is less than 125 days away, too.

With the end of summer and the season of vacations, it's time to address a recurring subject in this column. Why go to church (on Sunday)?

As a teacher of church history, I've had reason to do a little digging on the development of multiple services, something that was relatively rare outside of big city congregations until the Seventies.

The "worship wars" era ended in many locations with an uneasy detente, still on display in a number of churches, between so-called contemporary worship and traditional style services, obviously resulting in at least two services.

Seeker-sensitive church plants, which heralded the explosion of non-denominational congregations (and a fair number of denominational plants which worked hard to appear non-denim), almost always held contemporary worship style services, but they liked to offer multiple services to provide options. Remember, they're seeker sensitive. So you would have two or three Sunday morning, often a Sunday evening service, and increasingly a Saturday night offering.

This was, I suspect, a reaction to the development after the Second Vatican Council among U.S. Catholics to have what are sometimes called "vigil masses," aka Saturday night mass, which might happen well before dusk. There's a fascinating history to how this response grew out of a European preference for Sunday evening masses, which opened the door for a service "after sunset" on Saturday night, as counting for Sunday observance. The liturgical tradition was that the Sabbath began the evening before, so you could have an anticipatory worship Saturday "night" which was liturgically Sunday. The Vatican gave American Catholics formal clearance to do so through the Seventies, and it became a global norm in the early Eighties.

All of which meant by the time I got into parish ministry in the mid-Eighties, even smaller Protestant churches felt a fair amount of pressure to have at least two services, and medium sized ones could have Saturday night worship and three on Sunday.

(There's something to recall historically about how this hearkens back to our colonial Puritan history, echoing down into holiness influenced worship on the early frontier, where many churches held a morning service, ate Sunday dinner then returned for an afternoon service, and sometimes even an evening prayer meeting on top of all that, along with midweek worship often on a Wednesday night.)

COVID triggered what I think was a long impending re-set around worship services. Every time I talk about this online a number of people will jump in to say "my church has grown immensely since COVID!" but the wider picture is clear: church attendance has not bounced back. In Ohio, at any rate, the claim "it's because the government shut down churches" is not correct: there were recommendations and guidance offered, but no mandate to close (other states did so).

What each congregation had to struggle with was how to protect worshipers (especially elderly ones), especially during the peak periods of infection. There were changes begun during COVID that have lasted, including reductions on things being passed around like offering plates or attendance registers, and how communion was done. Changes around distribution of the bread and the cup have tended to last, even as the plethora of hand-sanitizer bottles have slowly dwindled to a few.

Meanwhile, lots of people stopped coming, and haven't started back yet. What are we to make of it, and how to talk about that change?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he fills the pulpit in a variety of church types these days, and has more to say on attendance. Tell him why you go, or don't, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.