Sunday Morning is Not The Future of The Church

Sunday morning is not the future of the church.

I’ve come to this sobering conclusion only recently. It’s sobering because I have only ever known “Sunday morning church.” I grew up as a child attending Sunday School and worship every Sunday morning. Attending church on Sunday mornings was not optional in my family. It’s just something we did every week.

As a young married couple, Leah and I worked hard to find a church that we could attend on Sunday morning, no matter where we lived.

And as an ordained pastor, Sunday morning is viewed as the most important part of the week. It is the focus of our practice and faith. Here at Kessler Park UMC, a large part of the budget is spent on staff and resources which will be used on Sunday morning.

However, it is becoming apparent that the Sunday morning experience is in rapid decline, not just at our church, but at churches across the country. Look at our own numbers — our average attendance in 2018 is 108, down significantly from an average of 124 through the first half of 2017.

I don’t think this is necessarily bad news; our membership continues to grow, we’re financially stable and had one of our best pledge campaigns last fall, and we have active members. But our members don’t come to worship on Sunday mornings as regularly as they used to.

Why is that? How do we account for what Perkins professor Dr. Ted A. Campbell refers to as “the contemporary situation that active families do not consistently worship weekly as active members did earlier in the twentieth century”?  Why don’t they? I would argue because our lives are far busier and more complicated than in the twentieth century.

Today, like it or not, Sunday mornings are a favorite time to schedule youth soccer matches, baseball games, swim meets, dance practices, and a host of other activities. Parents who work more than one job often have only Sunday mornings free to spend time with their children. Families are often simply exhausted by Sunday; there is no other morning of the week in which they can sleep in, read the paper with a cup of coffee, and snuggle on the couch.

This doesn’t mean that these families have forsaken their commitments to Christ or the church; it simply means that they — and all of us — live out our faith in a different context. Every generation has to work out its own worship patterns and habits in its own context. In fact, the 11:00 am worship hour emerged in a 19th-century American farming context; that time was late enough in the morning to allow farmers to get their cows milked and morning chores finished before heading off to the service!

That’s why I think it’s time for the Church (by which I mean Christians of various stripes and sects) to recognize that Sunday morning is not the future. What I mean is that we should stop deceiving ourselves, thinking that if we only find the right formula, we can get large crowds back into church on Sunday morning.

The verdict is in — American culture has spoken. We don’t own Sunday mornings anymore. We’re not going to get crowds back into church on Sunday mornings.

That doesn’t mean we should stop having worship services on Sunday mornings. Many of you are in the regular habit of worship, which I highly endorse!

But if we’re going to peer into the future, and seriously consider what the church of tomorrow is going to look like, we have to reckon with the fact that it will likely coalesce around something different besides the hour-long worship service on Sunday morning. Furthermore, as we think about the task of creating new spaces for new faces, we will have to increasingly abandon the Sunday morning habits and rituals we have created.

We will have to consider different days and times to meet, based on the days and times that people are actually available to meet.

We will have to consider different places for people to meet, based on the spaces which are convenient and available.

We will have to consider different ways to worship, based on what makes the most impact in people’s lives.

We will have to reconsider how much money we allocate for Sunday mornings compared to other activities, missions, and ministries.

We will have to consider whether our precious programs and curriculum are necessary anymore.

We will have to rethink what we do in worship. Perhaps sermons aren't the best way to spend our time together.

This isn’t bad news, by the way. It’s simply a recognition of reality. The only bad news is what will happen if the Church (and our church) doesn’t adapt, doesn’t find a way to follow Jesus in this new context, doesn’t engage people where they are.

Jesus is moving on ahead, regardless of whether or not we follow. There will always be a Church; there will always be a community of faithful followers of Jesus.

But the time is coming when they may not meet on Sunday mornings anymore.

A Newbie's Guide to Pledging

If you are new to the church, or have never made a pledge to the church before, this column is for you. Because the church “stewardship campaign” can be intimidating. You might wonder why we spend a couple of weeks talking about money so much.

You should think of it like a public radio pledge drive. It can be annoying to have NPR’s Morning Edition interrupted by pledge requests; and I don’t like hearing about pledges in the middle of This American Life, either. But it’s better than the alternative!

Like public radio, we aren’t a market enterprise. Thus, you’ll never hear commercials in the middle of a worship service. (And no, we’re not going to ever consider it. Even if you’re looking to promote your new pop-up goat yoga studio …)

And we’re not selling anything. If you haven’t heard me say it before, the grace of God is free. That’s the whole point — God’s love is freely given, freely received. We have nothing to sell, and we’re not planning to operate as if we do!

So the primary way the church funds its ministries is through asking people to pledge, just like the radio station. You could call it “crowdfunding.” In other words, we ask our members, friends, and visitors to help us do what we do. We always go through a budget process to plan for the coming calendar year, and attempt to finalize it before the end of the preceding year. The budget includes all the necessary items, such as property maintenance, utilities, office supplies, program materials, and, of course, personnel. Plus, we include strategic pieces and new missions that we would like to initiate.

A key part of the budget process is assessing how much income we can expect to generate in the coming year. That’s why we ask members to pledge. We need to know how much you all expect to give, so that we can plan our ministries and pass our budget.

Every year around the month of October, then, we spend a few weeks asking you to make your pledge. We accumulate the pledges and fine-tune our budget based on the total pledged amount. This is why pledging is important to the church; it is the way in which church leadership assesses how to proceed.

But a church pledge is only that — a pledge. It’s a matter between you and God ultimately. It’s not a contractual agreement. And we’re not going to send a bill collector after you.  We will send you a quarterly giving statement, which will let you know how much you have paid on your pledge year-to-date. But we won’t keep bugging you about it, like a public radio station might.

We can also make giving to the church an easy matter. On our website, you can make your pledge an automatic monthly or weekly payment. Just follow this link to automate your giving.

So far, I’ve described the pledge campaign in a purely functional and practical fashion — we’ve got to pay the bills, and this is how we do it.

As your pastor, I need to let you know that giving is about far more than just making financial donations. When you give to your church, you are not merely helping pay bills, pay the pastor, or even fund a particular mission of the church; you are literally performing an act of service to God. When you give to the church, you are giving to God, and you are giving to God’s mission in the world.

One of the most common images found in the Bible to describe the church is “the body of Christ.” Christ is still present in the world, but he is incarnated in the church; he lives and moves and has his being, in us! That’s not mere hyperbole, either. There is something very real about the concept that Jesus is alive and working through us.

It’s not really like making a pledge to a public radio station at all, in the end. For one, we don't give away tote bags ... I love public radio, and I think everyone should support it. But Kessler Park UMC has a greater mission to undertake, and a greater God to serve.

So I hope you will consider making a pledge for the first time. Let’s kickstart God’s work by Kickstarting KPUMC!