“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord.” This coming Sunday for the first time in aeons, I will be leading a service of choral evensong. My son-in-law, a vicar in rural Cheshire, was clearly scraping the barrel when he asked me to cover for him.
It’s being taken by a visiting choir who clearly have a passion for this unique Anglican service. But there again, it is unlikely that there will be many in the congregation. Such is the current status today of the Sunday 6.30 pm service.
Over the course of my ministry I have witnessed, first-hand even, the collapse of this once popular service, either as evensong or the 6.30 gospel service. It filled an important gap, but no longer.
Certainly at the start of my ministry all those years ago 6.30 was the main Sunday service, either as the main teaching service or the proclamation of the Gospel. This was the service you took your friends to. And for many this would be their second service of the day, often attending a second church where there was a stronger preaching tradition, to be spiritually fed.
Sadly in both churches where I was vicar, I witnessed the collapse of the 6.30 service at first hand. When I arrived at each church, there was a healthy congregation at 6.30 pm. When I left both services had dwindled, sometimes to single figures. It wasn’t altogether my fault: bigger factors were at play.
Today I don’t think there is a single Anglican church round here which has a 6.30 pm service on Sunday. The local Baptists do – but that’s about it for the whole of West Lancashire.
So why this sudden change in the space of a generation?
At the time many blamed “Ski Sunday” which began, Wikipedia tells me, on 15 January 1978. I can remember the furore. The pull of television was just too much for many saints. No VHS, of course. If you missed a programme, that was it.
But more: as we became a fully-fledged consumer society, there were so many more things to do on Sunday evenings. In fact, the whole way we spend Sundays has changed, including for Christians. For myself I would feel vaguely guilty if I went to the cinema on a Sunday, but that simply shows just how old I am.
And now very few Christians attend church more than once on a Sunday. Even if you wanted to, your options are limited. Not sure why this is the case but certainly when I was a vicar at Christ Church, I think only Maurice regularly attended more than one Sunday service.
However, one of the dilemmas for those in church leadership is when to challenge social trends and when to ride them.
I recall years ago going to a Willow Creek conference in Birmingham. Their whole ministry in Illinois, it seemed, was based on market analysis. They would carefully research which was the day and time which would best attract their target group of non-Christians. If that meant Saturdays at 4.00 pm, then that would be their service time. You tailor your ministry so as to attract the greatest number.
But at the same time Sunday is the day of Jesus’s resurrection which led those first Christians, thoroughly versed in the Jewish Shabbat, to meet together on a different day, the first day of the week. Accordingly I would argue that Sunday worship is in the Christian DNA and normally should be prioritised.
As it happens I became a Christian through a Sunday 6.30 service, a Gospel service at our nearby brethren assembly at Oxford Hall.
The service should have been cancelled, of course. But in those days, people didn’t have phones. That evening when I was due to meet Roger, there was a thick smog. (Thankfully as a result of the clean air acts we don’t get them anymore.) He had offered to meet me and take me for my first visit to his church.
But he wasn’t there. So I decided to go in anyway, only to discover a tiny congregation of about four old ladies and the elderly organist.
What I had not realised is that the preacher, fittingly named John Pope, had come specially over from New Brighton by public transport – two trains and a longish walk either end. It must have taken some commitment and no doubt when he arrived his heart must have sank – just a few old ladies and a young lad.
Even so he took the service, although it must have been strange preaching to such a small congregation. Take it from me, much more difficult than a packed church. And for this was the first time I heard the Gospel clearly spelled out and more, our need to make a response to God’s invitation of grace.
So I accepted Christ.
Such is God’s way of doing things that I have never been deterred by small numbers, even a tiny Sunday 6.30 congregation. Not that you would find one nowadays.
For often God is contrary, doing things in ways opposite to what I would consider sensible. He can, for the simple reason that he, and not me, is God.