GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Doug
De Vries describes Sunday evening worship as “a lot less formal” than the
morning service at Plymouth Heights Christian Reformed Church (CRC).
It’s also a lot less
crowded.
Plymouth Heights is in step
with a larger trend of declining evening attendance in evangelical
denominations that long have cherished a heritage of worshiping twice on
Sunday. Some evening services are more intimate; others have been cancelled or
replaced by an alternative.
“It’s a business question
that has been asked,” said De Vries, the church’s minister of music. “People
are spending time with their family (on Sunday nights) or using that time to
get together in small groups. We were concerned that we were squandering
resources to put the evening service together.”
Plymouth Heights’ 5 p.m.
worship service continues, with about 25 percent of the people who attend the
weekly Sunday morning service.
That mirrors data from
across the CRC, based on survey results presented this summer to the church’s
annual Synod. The survey found evening worship attendance is “plummeting,” down
from 56 percent of members in 1992 to 24 percent in 2007.
Researchers wrote that the
data “seems to suggest evening service attendance has become optional.”
It’s not just the CRC.
Officials at the Assemblies of God reported a 6 percent drop in Sunday evening
attendance, to 416,751, in 2009 even as the overall size of the denomination
grew by 1.2 percent, to 2.86 million.
There are different ways to
interpret the trend: Some see it as harmless, while others see worrisome
deviation away from doctrine. For others, the decline is a natural outcome of
the historically Dutch church’s aspirations to evangelize a broader
demographic.
RNS photo by Emily Zoladz/The Grand Rapids Press The Christian Reformed Church and other denominations have seen “plunging” attendance at Sunday evening services. |
“Many churches are
substituting evening worship and putting their energies into other things,”
said Jeff Meyer, pastor of Crosswinds Community Church, a 4-year-old CRC
congregation in Holland, Mich., that, like many new churches, does not conduct
evening worship.
“The people who are
exploring Christianity are not typically accustomed even to weekly worship a
single time. So to put forward some kind of a community-based expectation that
you do this twice a Sunday would be extraordinary.”
At Roosevelt Park Community
Church in Grand Rapids, attendance at Sunday evening services fell from as many
as 175 people in the mid-1990s to about 40 when the service was discontinued
five years ago, said Reginald Smith.
Ending the service has enabled
the church to put more energy into the morning service, children’s programs and
ministry during the week. The result has been a bigger focus on evangelism and
relational ministries, Smith said.
“We just saw incremental
diminishing returns (in attendance),” Smith said. “Younger families were much
busier with all the humming and bumming of life and they found other ways to
refresh themselves.
“The evening service was a
wonderful thing back in its heyday, but it cannot continue to function in the
same form that it has historically. For a lot of churches, that’s really a
harsh reality.”
The harsh reality, in David
Engelsma’s view, is that churches that drop evening worship are ignoring their
spiritual inheritance. The retired seminary professor calls the trend “plain evidence
of the great apostasy that Christ has predicted.”
Engelsma said evening
worship in the Dutch Reformed tradition dates to the 16th century, when
ministers taught from the Heidelberg Catechism. Engelsma’s Protestant Reformed
Church, which split from the CRC in 1925, still turns out en masse for Sunday
night services, he said.
“Basically, it’s the same
today with us as it was back in The Netherlands in the 1500s,” said Engelsma. “When
a parishioner sits year after year under the regular instruction of the
Heidelberg Catechism, he is going to be knowledgeable of and grounded in the
truths, the doctrines and the teachings of the Christian faith.”
Others, including Ron
Rienstra, a professor at the Reformed Church in America-affiliated Western
Theological Seminary, are concerned that Christians may be chipping away on the
one day a week that God commanded to be set aside and kept holy.
“The two services is a way
to frame the whole day as belonging to Lord,” Rienstra said. “The decline of
Sunday evening worship is a marker alongside many that our culture is becoming
more popularly secular. We’ve lost a sense of sacred time that is being offered
back to God.”
Some churches have dropped
the evening worship but offered an alternative. Grand Rapids’ Eastern Avenue
CRC now meets every other Sunday night for a half-hour of worship, a half-hour
of eating and an hour of small-sized “covenant groups.”
More than 200 people took
part in the groups last year, a significant increase from evening attendance
that “literally became a bit embarrassing,” said Fred Sterenberg, church
administrator.
“The decision (to end the
service) almost made itself because very few people were coming,” he said. “If
we’re talking tradeoff, (the covenant group alternative) is a pretty good
tradeoff.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Bunte
writes for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids,
Mich. Whitney Jones contributed to this report.)