Decisions, Decisions

This blog idea began June 08, 2008.

Question: How do people decide that they should go to this certain church service/event but skip that church service/event? Allow me to explain.

Most churches have three services each week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. And of course, you've got some form of group Bible study either before or after the Sunday morning service (at Southview it took place after). The problem is, attendance is typically high on Sunday morning, decent on Wednesday evening, and terrible on Sunday evening. Lately I've been wondering why this happens and how people work it out in their minds that this is acceptable (I'm completely guilty of it too, so I'm frustrated with myself just as much as I am with others). Two situations got me thinking about this...

The first was during an event called One Prayer that took place in June. I'll explain more about this event in my next post, but it was spread out over four Sunday evenings. The plan for each service was to play these pre-recorded video messages from some of the best preachers in the world, so I was honestly expecting tons of people to show up. The typical Sunday morning count was around 180. The One Prayer evening services brought in around 30 each week. I was baffled (not a word we use enough these days if you ask me!). Maybe we could have talked up the event more, maybe we should have put up flyers around the community advertising the event (even though it was really more for the already-churched than for newcomers). At any rate, the poor turnout made me wonder...

The second was when one of the youth told me he was skipping Sunday Morning Bible Study because he had a project to finish for school. Baffled once again. For some reason this tends to happen a lot with youth. It's hard to put my frustration into words here, but when a kid skips an hour of Bible teaching focused directly on them so they can finish their homework (when if they just came to class they'd still have from noon until 11pm to finish it...like that extra hour is gonna make or break their success) it drives me crazy. The same goes for when they have sports practice or just can't miss their favorite tv show. Sometimes I feel like parents severely underestimate the importance of the youth group. Please forgive me if I sound arrogant, but I honestly feel like, in most instances, an hour in a youth class that I'm teaching gets through to kids WAY more than an hour in the "big church" service. No disrespect to the senior pastors out there, but they would probably agree that their sermons are written and delivered mostly with adults in mind. My lessons are specifically designed for these youth. But if you suggested to the parents that this kid skip "big church" and work on the project during that time so he could still come to my SMBS class, I'm betting they'd freak.

Hopefully this heap of rambling made some sense. Comments?