Told you weekly might be a push but I’m back only one day late!
Certainly the world is getting busier and I have just spent the last 30minutes looking at my diary trying to plan the rest of the year out. Not in minuscule detail because who can do that? After a pandemic we are all a little reluctant to plan too far ahead. I wonder if the pandemic has made us even more risk averse. For sure our family holiday has been planned for UK theme parks rather than airport travel. Not that we don’t want to go abroad but we decided to risk queues of a different kind instead.
Living my life in weeks actually makes the year feel very short, especially when I want to squeeze in study leave. I don’t want to miss too many Sundays because that is the central gathering point of the Church. It is how ministers think and is how the structure of the Church is held together. If I close my Church building on a Sunday morning without due notice I must inform the Presbytery Office within 3 weeks. Or if we are doing joint services we must advertise as much as possible. Even who leads worship is protected and if it isn’t someone on the list of approved leaders again tell the presbytery (or don’t!). There are 52 Sundays in the year and I am ‘allowed’ 6 Sundays off with the associated weeks, and then one additional Sunday only which this year will be my marathon for Church funds. (Notice how I slipped that in!)
So far I have had two weeks off, two weeks off in the summer and one week provisionally planned, which due to Christmas Day being a Sunday will be the second week of advent. Throw in Covid scare and covid real and I have been off two Sundays sick.
So is Sunday the central element of the Church? It is how we measure ministers holidays - not by number of days but by number of Sundays. What about the discipleship group that meets on Tuesdays? What about the meet and greet at the Cafe drop in? Has the prioritisation of Sunday morning worship contributed significantly to the decline of the Church? Has measuring the health of a congregation by the size its congregation that meets on a Sunday morning rather than its place in the life of the community hidden the reality? For many churches they spend a fortune on insurance and property upkeep on a building open once a week for worship and maybe at other times for funerals or weddings. Others are incredibly active but small congregations. One of favourite placements on training was the smallest and arguably least wealthy but boy did they pray and work.
But Sarah - worship is so important I hear you say. The gathering of God’s people is fundamental to the life and witness of all. And absolutely. I am the last person to disagree with that. But how many have we excluded from worship, from engaging with the God who neither sleeps nor slumbers? If we believe that time is a construct, that God is beyond time and eternal, and that on the 7th Day he rested - surely what matters is we have a 7th day…whether it is Monday or Wednesday or Sunday. Online worship provision has gone some way towards meeting that need but there must be more. Yet if I said we were permanently moving our main worship slot from 10:30am on a Sunday morning to Friday at 5pm…for example. How many gave a wee intake of breath? I know for many a Catholic community, they love it!
Immediately we come up with a list of reasons why we can’t. And yet someone else went ‘yes please’. I won’t be stopping Sunday morning at 10:30am any time soon. The Presbytery Office wouldn’t be ready to received almost weekly letters informing them. ;)
But we need to look a more wholesome picture of congregational life. We can’t simply measure by Sunday attendance nor can we assume in a culture that is 24/7 that providing one diet of worship or even a midweek is enough. And surely where there are multiple congregations we don’t all need to provide worship in the same time window?
We are exploring the 5 marks of mission in our congregation and they are being used as markers across Mission Planning but we all know that underpinning our concept of healthy congregations will be statistics and budgets not ethos, effort and energy. As a minister my primary meeting with the congregation and community cannot just be the one hour on a Sunday morning. After all faith is a whole life experience not a Sunday only event (I hope).
Perhaps the question we need to ask is - when you remove Sunday from your ministry week, what does your church life look like for the wonderful ordinary folks of the congregation and the community? And when you look at your parish what does their week look like? Even gyms have gone 24/7 after all.
Now to write Sunday service….😇💞
God bless you! Love Sarah
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