Pros and Cons of adult Sunday school, evening services, mid-week services, etc.

A

Adam GB

Puritan Board Freshman
Fellow saints who attend churches with multiple services, could you describe what this looks like within the life of your church?

By multiple services, I don't mean a 9am and an 11am where the songs, sermon, prayers, etc., are just repeated. I mean an 8:30am adult Sunday school, a 10am morning service, a 6:00pm evening service, a Wednesday night mid-week service, etc.

What is the average Sunday like for your congregation? Does your congregation typically attend every service? Do the different services have different goals? (i.e., Martyn Lloyd-Jones used his Sunday night service for evangelistic sermons aimed at unbelievers and his Sunday morning service for sermons aimed at Christians). How have these several services benefitted your congregation, or has it overwhelmed them, or a bit of both?

As a pastor, how do you organize your preaching at these many services? Do you preach the same series through the morning, evening, and mid-week service, or do you have several series going at once? How do you balance your time preparing multiple weekly sermons? Or do associate pastors/lay elders handle the bulk of this additional preaching?

If you have these multiple services, do you also have a mid-week youth group, Bible studies, prayer meetings, life groups, etc.? If yes, how do you interweave these gatherings with your weekly corporate gatherings?

I attend a Baptist church with two copy-and-paste Sunday morning services. I've been thinking about how I would organize my church's weekly schedule if I ever, Lord willing, become lead pastor of a church. Hoping I can learn from the experiences of brothers and sisters in different church traditions
 
We have Sunday school, one morning service, a Sunday evening service, and Wednesday night activities.

What people attend seems to vary by family situation. I have a 2 year old and a 10 week old. We do not currently go to Sunday school, but we attend Sunday morning worship as a family. On Sunday evenings one of us takes the toddler to evening church and the other stays home with the baby because he still sleeps a lot. It's helpful that the evening service is at 5 pm because the toddler needs an early bedtime. We would not be making it if the service was at 6pm.
We don't currently attend Wednesday activities- our kids are too young and the only prescription I see in Scripture is that we must prioritize Sunday worship - so that's what we do right now.
 
Our schedule is every Lord's Day (with few exceptions): 8:30 am service; 9:45 am sunday school; 11:00 am service; 6 pm service. We have around 200 people on average in the morning divided between the two pretty much identical services. This is done for logistical reasons as our worship space sits around 130 people comfortably. I don't know the numbers for sunday school but I would guess about half of that. We average 60-80 on sunday evenings.

During the school year we have a Wednesday night program. We take breaks during school breaks and summers. This is not a worship service but a family supper, then children's programs and some sort of adult study.

For Sunday evening service, we structure it more like what one church I've attended called a "family Bible study." We have a time of singing (oftentimes practicing new selections from our Psalter or doing requests), a time of prayer which includes receiving prayer requests from the congregation and sometimes praying in groups, and then a time of study. While our pastor typically leads both the morning and evening services, with our recently retired pastor, the evening is more of a Bible study typically than a sermon. He'll go more in-depth in looking at nuances of the text and is not always as heavy on application. Occasionally an Elder will fill in (I will be filling in several times this month as we are transition to a new pastor).

Our Session has been trying to encourage evening attendance more, such as by moving our formerly concurrent children's program to Wednesday nights a few years ago. Realistically, we have a core group of folks who attend very faithfully from our church who love the additional time of fellowship and studying the Word, some folks who attend with less frequency from our church, and a small group of folks who attend from other churches because their home churches do not have an evening service. We've brought a few of them into our fold over time too. We also from time to time have had non-members who attend when they have to work on Sunday mornings, so we try to keep in mind that we have a more consistent contingent of non-Reformed people at our evening service.

Sunday evening services are quite important to me and others as I believe there is a Biblical pattern for morning and evening worship and the keeping of the whole Sabbath day as holy. Typically our Session has prioritized keeping Sunday evening worship going when there are other activities, including Sunday school, that are cancelled more regularly due to other circumstances.

While I would like to see better attendance on Sunday evening, I believe they are a great blessing. One benefit I have found is that fellowship seems to particularly be effective in this time. While after the morning service folks are often hurrying home for lunch or naps or whatever the case might be, holy conversation seems to flow quite well after the evening service and I'm frequently there well after the service ends. I know personally the schedule makes it much easier to keep the Lord's Day as well.

We have a robust Sunday school program I'm happy to talk more about if you would like as well, but the short version is that most of the teaching is handled by elders while the pastor will have an opportunity to use the time for a respite or joining a class. We have a rotation of a few elders who teach adults and then a mix of teachers for children's classes divided by age.
 
Our Session has been trying to encourage evening attendance more, such as by moving our formerly concurrent children's program to Wednesday nights a few years ago. Realistically, we have a core group of folks who attend very faithfully from our church who love the additional time of fellowship and studying the Word, some folks who attend with less frequency from our church, and a small group of folks who attend from other churches because their home churches do not have an evening service. We've brought a few of them into our fold over time too. We also from time to time have had non-members who attend when they have to work on Sunday mornings, so we try to keep in mind that we have a more consistent contingent of non-Reformed people at our evening service.

Sunday evening services are quite important to me and others as I believe there is a Biblical pattern for morning and evening worship and the keeping of the whole Sabbath day as holy. Typically our Session has prioritized keeping Sunday evening worship going when there are other activities, including Sunday school, that are cancelled more regularly due to other circumstances.

While I would like to see better attendance on Sunday evening, I believe they are a great blessing. One benefit I have found is that fellowship seems to particularly be effective in this time. While after the morning service folks are often hurrying home for lunch or naps or whatever the case might be, holy conversation seems to flow quite well after the evening service and I'm frequently there well after the service ends. I know personally the schedule makes it much easier to keep the Lord's Day as well.
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This is a very consistent theme I've seen among good evening services, or even a church-wide evening Bible study if a second service isn't possible (such as with a morning only rental situation). People tend to have to be shoo'd out from evening services in a way that's less common for morning services and that unstructured time is really valuable for discipleship and fellowship.
 
In the past, for quite a few years we were a part of a church plant where we set up and I prepared for music which I facilitated morning and evening, then we had morning service, then had a fellowship lunch, then we hung out for a few hours, then gathered for prayer meeting, then gathered for evening worship service, then we helped clean everything up, then we typically either had people over our house for dinner or went to somebody else's house for dinner. We did all this every Sunday while our kids were very young. Though I am grateful to be able to serve God's Church, after a while this really became tiring and burdensome, to where the day was not one of rest and refreshment.

In our current situation we show up in the morning and teach a class for the four and five year olds, then have morning worship. Every other week we do an afternoon community group. Other than that we just kind of rest and have family time in the afternoon. Throughout the week there is plenty going on at our church that we choose to be involved in, and all this seems to be just right for our family at this point.

So I guess my wisdom would be that if you have a small number of people, don't stretch them too thin. But if you have many people, you can pull off a lot more things.
 
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Two different worship services on the Lord's Day at 10:30am and 2:15pm. Fellowship potluck lunch in between every Lord's Day. Children's Sabbath school catechism classes at 1:15pm. Usually attendance is fairly equal morning and afternoon services. Sometimes even more in afternoons due to visitors coming. The session tries to facilitate the Lord' Day as best as possible to encourage Sabbath-keeping and honoring of the 4th commandment.
Wednesday evening Prayer service at 6:30pm at two different member homes across DFW. One household has the live minister with preaching and we stream it to the other household an hour away where families on that side of the Metroplex can gather. It is a worship service with a sermon and Psalm singing but we also include extended times of prayer by male communicant members.
 
I very much appreciated the pattern at a sister OPC church when we had to be out of town this past late winter/early spring:

>Worship
>Announcements
>Sunday School
>Often a dinner for some group or another
>Late afternoon prayer (seemed more appropriate for actual members, so I didn't attend)
>Evening worship
>At least once a month, fellowship at an elder's home
This was a rich, full sabbath day.
 
Adam GB said:
I mean an 8:30am adult Sunday school
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No 8:30 adult Sunday School. There used to be an early one, but it didn't survive Covid. So adult Sunday School classes are only available at 9:15 and 11. (One apparently doesn't start until 9:30). Same sermon now at all 3 morning services (8:00 used to have a different sermon on the same verses as the other two services). Weekly communion at the 8:00 service and no choir is still distinctives there. There is a lightly attended Wednesday evening service with communion but I'm not sure if it is year - round or just spring and fall. They tried a contemporary evening service at one point after we managed to beat back attempts to make the 11:00 service contemporary. (Not a pretty fight, but a necessary one.) It, probably fortunately, eventually died out.
 
We are a pretty small flock. 10 AM we have "Sunday School" which currently emphasizes systematic theology following the 1689 and Westminster confessions. But even in Sunday School we emphasize both law and gospel and call for people to repent and focus on Christ. 11:15 is a normal expository sermon, currently in Ephesians.

We have fellowship meals followed by prayer meetings a couple time a month. The reality of renting space and a small flock suggests this is a good balance.
 
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