This Wednesday is the Fourth of July. Wednesday is also Prayer Meeting night in many Baptist churches.
If you were raised like I was, the pastor drilled into your head the importance of attending church every time the doors were open. Especially on Prayer Meeting night. On Prayer Meeting night you came to church to get your spiritual gas tank filled. Spiritual, sold-out, consecrated,on-fire Christians made Prayer Meeting an absolute weekly essential. Miss Prayer Meeting and risk backsliding.
Except…when Prayer Meeting or Sunday services fall of the day of a Holiday. All of a sudden attending church every time the doors are open is optional. Countless Baptist churches will cancel Prayer Meeting on Wednesday so everyone the pastor can spend time with his family or go away for a family get-to-gether.
When holidays fall on a Sunday churches will often have a service on Sunday morning. They will then cancel the evening service. Why not cancel both services? Are you ready for me to share a dark secret from the never before revealed Pastor’s manual?
Thou shalt always have one service on Sunday so you can get the money.
Pastors know if they don’t collect the offering on Sunday many people will not double-give the next Sunday.
Bruce, you mean it is all about the money? Sadly, more so than most pastors would ever admit. (budget pressures are a constant problem. God is not very good at paying his bills)
The next time you see a pastor cancelling a service so people can spend time with their family just give him that, I know better, look. The truth is pastors and their parishioners like holidays just like the rest of us and are quite willing to jettison “attending church whenever the doors are open” when they need to. I just wish they were honest about it.
I just figured the preacher knew attendence would be down anyways… and he is always talking about money. i have nightmares of the poor poverty sticken widow who threw her sixpence in the offering plate and it was more valued than the jewels from the richest folk. only difference is, the rich folk probably ate that day and the poor widow didn’t.
In this area I see this in mainline churches, but with the evangelicals, not as much. The huge Baptist church in my tiny town is having a big fireworks and picnic supper at the ball field on Monday night, except they may have had to cancel the fireworks. It is so dry here I don’t think anyone is allowed to have them except one big city that shoots them from a river barge at a river front park.
Some Baptist churches have Sunday evening services if Christmas is on a Sunday, and all do in the morning. They generally do cancel Sunday night service for baccalaureate evening. They tend to have their Christmas programs two weeks before Christmas, maybe afraid the closer it gets to the holiday, the fewer people will have a spare evening.
Methodists have communion on Christmas eve between ten p.m. and midnight, which I think is lovely.
The entire forty years I’ve known my oldest sister-in-law, she has been grumbly when Christmas came on Sunday. She says if you go all the rest of the year, you shouldn’t “have” to go on Christmas, because that is a day for family. This always struck me as an incongruous attitude.
That explains a lot. I knew he wasn’t paying any attention to the poor and the sick and the oppressed.
The preacher has to put food on the table, nothing wrong with that.
We are under grace, not law.
Not according to Jesus. Is it Ok for me to steal my neighbors car, sleep with his wife, kill his kids, and tell the police he did all these things? It is the Law that says, this is sin. Grace without law is libertine licentiousness. Surely it matters how people live. If not, I hope Christians will please stop beating everyone over the head with the B-I-B-L-E.
As someone who lived by people’s Christian generosity, I know that many people give out of a very sincere and generous heart. In their spirit, I now give monthly to help impoverished people in Africa and elsewhere, to have clean water and medicines for their children, and I would encourage all ex-Christians to do the same. The organization I support is Action Against Hunger http://www.actionagainsthunger.org/. All of the cherished values of goodness in Christianity arise out of our good human hearts, and there is no better token of our commitment to such goodness than a generous and sharing spirit. It puts the lie to the right. And the joy of helping others knowing that there is no secret tally to one’s advantage somewhere is breathtakingly sweet. May everyone thrive.