Between Christmas and New Year a bunch of churches cancel church. You’ll often see the same behaviour on August Bank Holiday weekend too.
Don’t.
No, let me be more nuanced. It is, for example, entirely understandable that many church plants cannot maintain the momentum and volunteer strength required to run a Sunday at particular times of year. If you live in the sort of place that people leave at holiday times then in plants it can be particularly challenging. It often requires an army of people to put out chairs and set up tech and all the rest of it. That’s reasonable enough, though something that should fade away after the planting stage, there will be examples where the church is small and it’s difficult to make it work.
It is, for example, also entirely understandable that many churches that rent their premises—which the vast majority of those small ‘used to be church plants’ will do—struggle at certain times of the year. While they could muster the volunteer base, even if it isn’t the usual people, the reality is that they can’t get their venue. Perhaps its simply shut at certain times of the year. Many churches meet in schools, and this can become particularly tricky during the holidays. There’s not a lot they can do about it.
However, if you aren’t in either of those situations, there’s not much reason to ‘cancel church.’
For clarity, I’m not talking about whether or not your church met on Christmas Day. That’s one of those things that lots of people love and seem appalled if a church doesn’t, but it’s entirely within a given local church’s gift to decide whether they do so or not. There could be great wisdom either way depending on particular circumstances. I attended church on Christmas morning this year for the first time in decades—I was preaching—and it was fun, but not required.
That’s different, in my opinion, on a Sunday. It’s a Sunday. That’s when we gather. The church gathers on the first day of the week (Acts 20; 1 Corinthians 16) and is encouraged to not give up meeting together (Hebrews 10). There are people in your church for whom your weekly meeting is a lifeline. There are people in your church who haven’t seen anyone over that holiday season and need human contact. And, most importantly, it’s a Sunday so we worship Jesus.
If the place is flooded or something I understand, but even then you’re going to try to figure out an alternative. Your congregation needs weekly worship; they need to be fed by Jesus. So do you.
My concern is twofold. First, Covid was the final nail in the coffin of a lot of people prioritising church. When we don’t gather due to reasons in our control what we communicate is that church is optional. The Church is not optional, friends.
Second, when we do have to cancel due to reasons out of our control, we need to communicate that in a way that communicates what we believe about church. When I see a church—even one that can’t meet for what I consider legitimate reasons—saying church isn’t on ‘so we can have a rest’ it makes me want to pull my eyes out of my skull. I don’t think that’s overdramatic. What are you telling your people if they need to ‘rest’ from church? You’re telling them that church is work. They already do six days of that a week, most likely. Church is meant to be rest. Resting from church is a category mistake. If church feels like work, then you might want to take a look at your culture, but more importantly teach your people what rest is: to worship God with his people at the start of the week.
If church can’t be on, communicate lament in your words. Ask your people to pray that you can find a way to meet that Sunday next year. Express that you’re sad you can’t. Encourage them to worship with other churches, maybe even point them to some that are meeting. In doing so you express that worship is important, as well as communicating broad friendship with some other gospel preaching churches in town.
There is, of course, the matter of perverse incentives. If your church staff make these decisions, are only allowed a certain numbers of Sundays off, but a Sunday when church isn’t on doesn’t count towards that number—all of which are reasonable positions to take—then it can accidently lead to the perverse incentive where not having church on a week when the staff are tired and would like a break feels like a good option to them. That’s not malicious, it’s probably not conscious, that’s just the way perverse incentives work. In that example, you don’t need to change the incentives, as they’re reasonable, but you do need to change the script. It’s especially difficult when a church moves for the first time from that planting phase into being able to meeting every Sunday as that’s when staff members will feel the pinch: suddenly they have to ‘work’ more often. We just need to be aware of the reality of these incentives and envision the team about the importance of Sundays. If you were generally going to church elsewhere when your church wasn’t meeting that’s probably going to help you.
Whatever you have to do, make sure church is not just a priority but talked about like gathering weekly to worship Jesus is the most important thing on the planet. It just so happens that it is.
Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash
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