Grace Davie's excellent books notwithstanding, I'd like to consider another reason for the decline of the Sunday evening service. This is the division that is age.
Many of the churches I have either visited or worked in have had lively services in the morning or some other form of service which meant that the older or more 'traditional' church goers found themselves moving into the security of the, predominantly BCP Evensong, evening service. This is the reason that evensong is the most popular of all the services that BCP offers.
The problem is that those who have been going to the evensong to escape the Sunday morning madness are not only a church in their own right but they are an old church. This brings together a number of factors to be considered:
i. The service has a high age profile, something which the comment "Churches die old and grow young," makes valid. Those who make this service their own are old and diminishing because, quite frankly, they're dying!
ii. The service has a captive (and potentially exclusive) audience which, more often than not, sees off any newcomers (well,young newcomers anyway) and so any hopes of longevity for the service are dashed before they can materialise.
iii. Everything revolves around the Evensong service in such a way that all you need is two/three evensongs, one communion and a fifth Sunday 'Prayer and Praise' each month and you have the Sunday evening services planned until Jesus returns.
So what do we need to do to make the Sunday evening attractive and overcome the problems?
We obviously need to attract younger people but the minute we consider this, people tell us we need to lose the evensong and this cause the Sunday morning exiles (also known as the 'Wrinklies')to go stark raving bonkers.
We obviously need to be doing something in our evening services that is either attractive or not a Sunday evening!
Recently,I went into a church just before their Sunday evening service started and counted heads. Congregation eight, choir twelve, one preacher, one crucifer and an organist. Those doing the service outnumbered those coming for it by almost 2:1. The average age of the consuming public was low to mid seventies. All it will take is a bad Winter and that's the game gone!
And the sad footnote?
As I left, one of the old folk sitting at the back remarked how sad it was because, "They used to get over a hundred and fifty at this service when I was young!"
No comments:
Post a Comment