Saturday Night Church: What Were We Thinking?

By Brian Jones

I surveyed pastors for one full year about Saturday night services and my church decided to launch one in December 2005. We killed it April 2006.

The service was reaching 150-200 people (we ran 800-plus in the other three), but 95 percent of them were Christ”s Church of the Valley transfers from Sunday morning to Saturday night. Of those people who switched services, well over one-third of them still came to Sunday morning.

We cast vision for one year, recruited a massive team of volunteers to pull it off, and sunk $30,000 into direct-mail and signs to advertise it. We gave the new Saturday night service everything we had.

Everyone told us to be successful we had to offer programs identical to Sunday morning, so we offered a full kids and teen program identical to our Sunday service. Everything was the same.

I hated life more during the four months we did Saturday night services 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 family hated it. My kids hated it. My wife was great about it (since that became the service she attended and served at) but over time she noticed how that one service trapped 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.

If I had seen measurable data showing the Saturday service achieved killer outreach 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 have a service even that Saturday. Our entire church was elated.

That decision to launch a Saturday night service was one of my worst decisions at CCV. My decision to kill it was one of my best.

We have adopted Andy Stanley”s philosophy here: Never, under any circumstances, will we ever have a Saturday night service, even if we think it could be a great outreach avenue. The value we place on caring for our staff and enjoying life together takes precedence over adding one-seventh more unchurched people to our aggregate worship attendance.

Brian Jones is senior pastor with Christ”s Church of the Valley outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This article is adapted from a post in Brian”s blog, which you can find at www.preachingstandard.com.