I've Been Thinking About This…

I was thinking the other day about how our church year starts with the school year. The summer drop-off is over, and we’ve used those lean months and put all our efforts during them into planning for a successful startup in the fall. There’s a definite drop-off during the summer, isn’t there?

We tend to think that ‘people are away on vacation’, and some of that is true, of course – schools are out, so parents take time to travel with the kids. In fact, when they go away for a week, they tend be away for the weekends at both ends of that week, so attendance is hit twice as hard. Trying to categorize attendance loosely. I came up with:

1. People who do come to church during the summer,
2. People who are vacationing in the area who come to church here,
3. People who are away on vacation, and
4. People who don’t bother coming to church during the summer. They’re in the area, but they see church as either
• essentially a social organization,
• a priority only when combined with nursery or Sunday School in order to get a break from the kids, or
• less important than a morning at the beach, a round of golf or a lie-in.

So we move the service times earlier, both because of the heat and to let people get on with their fun activities for the rest of the day. And many times we don’t put the effort into the service that we would otherwise – the choir stops, or the coffee stops, or the pastor switches off with a lay speaker. And as a result, the sermons tend to be shorter, and there’s a tendency to make them simpler, on the grounds that there are people visiting, and church should be lighter. Further, our logic goes, we’ve lost so many over the summer, we don’t want to lose more by getting intense.

I would suggest, however, that the above indicates that – if anything – summer is the time to go deeper. To preach more meat and less milk, because the people attending are the mature Christians who crave insight, and long for solid – even difficult – teaching. This is the time of the year to speak of the sovereignty of God; of obedience in difficult circumstances; of persecution and its power; of the disciplines of Christianity; of the need for personal prayer and meditation; of the pain and power of personal sacrifice; of worship as an end rather than a means.

Could it just be that this annual drop in attendance is something to be used, not feared? Should we attack rather than retreat?

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