Years ago a good friend of mine emailed me and asked my advice concerning whether or not I thought his church should start a Saturday night service. Lots of pastors are weighing whether or not this is a good move, and rightly so. I get this question a lot, so I thought I’d share what I told him years ago:
Vince,
If you call me on my cell I can talk a lot faster than I can type, but in a nutshell here was our experience:
1. I surveyed pastors for one full year about Sat. night services and decided to launch one in December of 2005. We killed it in April of 06, four months later.
2. The service was reaching 150-200 people (we ran 800+ in the other three), but 95% of them were CCV transfers from Sunday morning to Saturday night. Of those people who switched services well over 1/3 of them STILL came to Sunday morning.
3. We cast vision for one year, recruited a massive team of volunteers to pull it off, and sunk $ into direct-mail & signs to advertise it. We gave it EVERYTHING WE HAD.
4. Everyone told us that if you are going to be successful you had to offer the IDENTICAL programs you offer on Sunday mornings, so we offered a full kid’s and teen program identical to our Sunday service. Everything was the same.
5. I hated life more during the four months we did Saturday night than any other time during our church’s six year history. It robbed a day from my work week because we made Monday a mandatory day off. Saturdays with my family were gone. Over. Outta here. I had to cut out of everything at noon. My kids weren’t thrilled because I started missing all their sports activities. My wife was great about it (since that became the service she attended and served at) but over time she began to notice how that one service began to trap our family even more to the internal orbit of the church. My personal evangelism began to suffer. We gave staff weekends off to compensate for their weekends being completely ripped off from them, but then we noticed a severe lack of continuity between programming and the overall quality of the services and kids’ programs. Everything suffered: The quality of our programs; the morale of our staff; my overall attitude toward the church.
6. If I had seen measurable data that showed the Sat. service was a killer outreach venue I would have given it much, much longer to play out, but we couldn’t see any progress toward that goal, so it became a HUGE relief to our staff when one day I stood up before everyone and said, “Guys, does anyone else besides me think this Saturday night service was a really stupid idea?” Two hours later we killed it. That was on a Wednesday at our staff lunch. We sent letters to the church and made phone calls to our volunteers and didn’t even have a service that Saturday. Our entire church was elated.
7. That decision to launch a Saturday night service was one of my worst decisions made here at CCV. My decision to kill it was one of my best.
8. We have adopted Andy Stanley’s philosophy here: Never, under any circumstances, will we ever have a Saturday night service, even if we thought it could be a great outreach venue. The value we have on caring for our staff and volunteers and enjoying life together takes precedence over adding 1/7 more unchurched people to our aggregate worship attendance.
Brian
What do you think? Does your church have a Saturday night service? Has it been a positive experience? For staff? For volunteers? For attenders? Did you kill one?
