For The Love of Evening Services

It is no secret that many churches do not have a Sunday evening service. Some have small groups meeting in homes on Sunday nights such as some of the churches in our area. Other have replaced their Sunday evening service with a Wednesday evening service to draw more people. Some churches have evening services where the preacher preaches the same sermon from Sunday morning to give people a chance to hear the sermon in case they could make it to the morning service. I like that idea a lot.

The issue of whether or not to have a Sunday evening service is pretty much debatable in the church, but it should not divide us. We should rejoice when churches have people meeting in homes so the gospel can be effectively communicated in their community. We should also rejoice when people get saved after hearing the gospel during a Sunday night service.

Are there some benefits to having a Sunday evening service? Tim Challies recently wrote about why he loves an evening worship service:

Perhaps the best part of having an evening service is that, just as the morning service allows you to begin the day worshiping God with his people, the evening services allows you to close the day worshiping God with his people. As a church we love to sing the song “We Are Listening” which proclaims, “Morning and evening we come / To delight in the words of our God.” And with an evening service, we are able to do exactly that: We begin the Lord’s Day in worship and close it in worship. That’s a beautiful thing.

If beginning and ending the day in corporate worship is an obvious blessing of an evening service, a less obvious but still important benefit is that having these bookends around the day encourages the best uses of the Lord’s Day while discouraging the less significant uses. Knowing that you will have to leave the house before the football game ends does wonders to uproot any real desire to watch football (or, over time, to even care about football, as I have discovered!). Conversely, knowing that you have four or five hours between services helps you spot a perfect window for extending hospitality. There is no better or more convenient time to open your home, especially to those who drive from a distance, than between the morning and evening service.

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