Nine Ways to Build Your Sunday Night Service

 

          Last week I wrote about why the Sunday night service is the sweetest service of the week. In that post, I mentioned that for many years our evening service was moribund at best and often downright depressing. The Lord in His grace, however, turned it around and it truly became the sweetest service of the week. In this post, I want to describe what I did to turn it around. I am not saying everyone should copy my approach, but you may find an idea or two here that is helpful if not key in edifying your own church.

          At the outset let me say that this turnaround was gradual rather than sudden. I do not know how to do anything in a hurry, and the older I get the less that bothers me. Slow growth is often solid growth. When I arrived in Chicago our membership was over 600 with an average Sunday morning attendance of about fifty. Sunday night was dismal. In the early days, we struggled to get to twenty. Over time, it grew in both number and spirit and the last five years saw us routinely fill the expanded auditorium in the evening.

          First, I would urge you to emphasize the Sunday night service in the Sunday morning service. I know it is a regular on the schedule. Announce it anyway. You do not have to hassle people about it. Simply mention it. One way to do this is to announce your sermon title/topic for the evening. This keeps the idea of the evening service before the people.

          Second, package other things around the evening service. In our case, choir practice precedes the evening service and our leader’s meeting is held after it. If you like music and you want to sing, it brings you back on Sunday night. If you want to serve in some capacity beyond the simplistic, an organizational/training meeting is essential. Since we do that on Sunday night that brings in those folks as well. It goes without saying we do not schedule these during the service, but around it.

          Third, take your Sunday night service on the road. You can do this literally by having the service somewhere else. In Chicago, in the summer we would often hold the service on the front yard. That reminded our people that the building was not the church, and it put us in front of the neighbors. The vehicle and foot traffic was noisy, but we had good times in that yard. Here in Dubuque this summer we will be holding three Sunday night services in the Washington Square Park downtown. It will be the regular service, but at the same time it will be unique.

          There are other ways to do this. When our Chicago church was smaller but growing we labeled one month of the summer Evangelism Month. That month we took the entire church out soul winning during the evening service time, and then followed that up with a meal. It emphasized soul winning while at the same time making Sunday night a big deal. Another method of doing the same thing is to bring in guest preachers on Sunday night. That helps build excitement, encourages good relationships with area churches, encourages that pastor, and gives you a break all at the same time. In that case, he is on the road, but you get my drift.

          Fourth, do not cancel your Sunday evening service for family time. I do not think it is wrong to cancel an evening service. Over the years I have done it occasionally for weather reasons. I also do it once every seven years when Christmas falls on Sunday, though that year we have a Christmas Eve service the night before. We just do not cancel other than that. There are five other evenings of the week that are good for family time, especially if you do not overschedule or overdrive your people. When you cancel the evening service for family time it sends a terrible message about what you actually think of that service slot. After all, if it is helpful to a family for them to miss church one particular Sunday night in order to be together than it is helpful for them to do it again. And again. You know what makes good family time? Sitting in a pew together, belting out the hymns, and hollering Amen during the preaching. I am not joking either.

          Fifth, make the congregational singing a big deal. I am weary of the assertion that conservative churches have uninspiring music. It is such a canard. It is hard to have good congregational singing if your tiny group is rattling around in a cavernous sanctuary. It is hard to have good congregational singing without instrumental accompaniment. It is hard to have good congregational singing with a weak song leader. But most of those can be overcome with work and time, and especially with prayer. I cannot count the number of times I have seen the Lord bring a particular laborer to my church in answer to prayer, someone with a skill set we desperately needed. Pray for instrumentalists (and teach the ones you have to teach your young people.) Pray for good song leaders (and work hard at developing the men you have.) Pray for the Lord to fill your empty pews (and work hard at doing so yourself.) And set to, and sing with a will.

          Congregational singing is not a time filler. It is a scripturally mandated, scripturally exemplified, deeply precious part of the church service. Pick songs that are fun to sing. Include a time slot each week for people to choose their favorite number. Pastor, you lead that time slot. Get behind the pulpit, forget about song leading, and just sing along with all your heart. Your enthusiasm will be infectious, and the resulting congregational singing will raise the roof. The interaction with your people between numbers will deepen the sense of joy and delight that God’s people share in each other during the evening service. Make lots of joyful noise.

          Sixth, be persistent. I did not have down weeks. I did not even have down seasons. I had down years, perpetually, one after the other. Every single excuse I hear from other men about why they are abandoning the traditional Sunday night is one I experienced. But I just kept hammering away, month after month, year after year. And one day I looked up and found myself liking what our church had become, enjoying myself immensely of a Sunday night. But that took years.

          Seventh, focus on men. Build men. If you reach men, you reach the entire family. If you build a good, solid, sweet relationship with your men they troop into church of a Sunday night with a grin on their face, a KJV under their arm, and a passel of people in their train. They tell their evangelical friends about the service, and pretty soon you have a row or two of those. They pick up seniors and the handicapped. They go down to the mission and bring a carful. When men love church you have got something pretty special. So build your men, and build your relationship with your men.

          Eighth, preach your best sermons on Sunday night. Eventually, even your bad sermons become good ones on Sunday night just because the atmosphere is awesome, but at first you have to fight the atmosphere. So fight it. Dedicate yourself to put sermons in that slot you really want to preach. Choose subjects that move you. Put more time into the preparation. Be pregnant with truth when you get up to preach of a Sunday evening. People ought to look at each other in the car on the drive home and say, “Wow, but we surely heard the Word tonight.” Make those sermons something that cannot be missed.

          Ninth, believe in it contagiously. For forty years Lee Roberson pastored the great Highland Park Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My father trained under him. He was known for many things, but particularly for this statement: everything rises and falls on leadership. In our generation such an idea is controversial if not downright rejected. We manufacture excuses. We embrace philosophical approaches that minimize the importance of leadership and of the pastor’s responsibility to set the pace. Under the guise of a rejection of lordship over the brethren we have succumbed to the siren song of mediocrity. We think if the Sunday night service is a problem it is an intractable one, one best solved by throwing in the towel.

          Away with such foolishness! A call to pastor is a call to lead. If your Sunday night service is wretched, fix it. Throw yourself into it hammer and tongs. Give it everything you have got. Work. Prioritize. Promote. Pray. Preach. Think. Sing. Organize. Lead the thing. Thermometers get their temperature from their environment; thermostats determine it. Be a thermostat. Stop buying into the defeatist atmosphere of your people. Believe in the importance of the Sunday night service. Practice that belief. The result will be stronger music, stronger men, stronger families, stronger preaching, and a stronger church. The result will be a church that people desperately want to be a part of, one they hate to miss, one they talk about to everyone they know. It will become a church you want to be a part of, one that is easier to direct because it is on the move.

          Pastoring is a joy when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. New converts get plugged in quickly when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Discouraged saints are strengthened when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Boys are called to preach when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Altars are filled with weeping people when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Spines are strengthened to withstand the spirit of the age when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Criticism withers for lack of fuel when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Your town starts to notice when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. People are edified when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. The cause of Christ is advanced when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Heaven is tasted when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week. Best of all, God is glorified when Sunday night is the sweetest service of the week.

          May God bless your labor and prayer and leadership with the grace to make it so.