Growing Pains: The Church in Transition

It was rumored that another huge change was coming four months ago. The relatively new pastor at the church I regularly attend made a very strong suggestion to combine the two Sunday morning services. The church had made a radical change about ten years earlier to split the traditional Sunday service into a contemporary service and a traditional service. The contemporary service would serve the needs of those who felt they weren't being served by the traditional service. In other words, they were bored out of their minds and rebellious. I don't blame them, but it did create some issues that weren't present before. The contemporary service relaxed the discipline and morals that the traditional service enforced. It allowed for more freedom to worship whatever way a person wanted to worship. It deluded the message considerably.

The traditionalists, at first, weren't happy about the change. They saw what was happening to the church and the message. Some balked and left the church to find another church that still had traditional services. Others stuck it out, figuring that they should embrace the new ways of reaching others for Christ. They liked the fact that there was still room for them at the church. They also liked the fact that they could still stick to the traditional service at the traditional time. Unfortunately, church leadership noticed that traditional service attendance was declining a few years ago. There were still people attending this service but many were senior citizens set in their ways. The traditionalists, in other words, were dying and no one was replacing them. The young with a few exceptions were being steered away from the traditional services with their authoritative settings and serious tones. It isn't surprising. The moral decay of the outside world is affecting the church in a big way.

It was decided about two years ago due to the decline in church attendance to change things up. For the first time in the church's history, the traditional service time would change from 11 am to 11:30 am. The contemporary service would move to 9 am with the Sunday School hour in between. It worked but once the new pastor came on board, he wanted to change it once again. He couldn't do it that first year as he was still getting settled in his new position. It wasn't until he served two years that he decided on some more radical changes.

The changes included forcing people to "shepherding" groups designed to make people embrace new theologies and break barriers. It also included the elimination of some old habits that were hampering the church's growth. Some changes were good. The church really does need to reach out to the community more. This huge change, however, will alienate the remaining traditionalists by flipping the church service to an earlier time and creating a forced social time between church and Sunday School.