What about Monday?
Sunday gets all the attention. Sunday can get filled up with social activities, bike rides in the park, trips to the city, basketball tournaments and trying to catch up on the homework that is due the next day. For some families it is filled with shopping and laundry. There are many of my younger generation friends that have no choice but to work on Sundays (that is if they want to keep their job). Then of course there’s that little thing we call “church.”
Good or bad, right or wrong, there can be a real struggle to make it to a church service on a Sunday morning.
As we have prayed about how to continue to extend our reach into the community and help more people experience the life to the fullest that Jesus came to give us - the leadership have stacked hands and agreed that a non-weekend worship experience would be a blessing to our city. There are many people in our city that can’t attend church on a weekend because of their work schedule and we want to help them be able to have a worship experience. It is also agreed that Mondays might become what one friend called, “Make up Mondays.” When your weekend is crammed with life events, travel or illness and you must miss a Sunday service - you can still catch a Monday evening service and hear the same message and get a very similar worship experience to the previous days’ time together.
Starting in April, for the first time in 52 years, Neighborhood Church will offer a Monday Night worship service. It will have the same flavor that our Sunday worship services do. There will be a few differences to note. School age kids will join us for the singing part of worship, and then be dismissed to their classes. “Littles” (small children) will have their classes throughout the entire 90 minutes. We will start at 7pm, and plan to be done at 8:30pm or so.
We are really excited to empower you to invite your friends who work on the weekends to join us on Mondays. We believe this is meeting an unmet need in our city and we believe that our church will grow by another 1/3! While this represents more work for the staff and for many volunteers, there is a growing excitement among those who will be serving on Mondays. We are choosing to do this and we are joyful about seeing God move and do great things.
Will you pray with us about who you might invite on a Monday evening in April as we get this worship service started? Our launch will be eight days after Easter, on Monday April 4th. Both Easter and this Monday night worship will be excellent times to invite a friend who doesn’t know Jesus, or invite someone who does know Jesus but has dropped out of church altogether.
May God bless Mondays as we explore a new day of the week to worship as a church family! We can’t wait to see what God is going to do in expanding His Kingdom through us!