Being on staff as the Director of Worship and Discipleship, one of my roles is to...well, direct worship. What does that mean? It means that I oversee everything that happens in our corporate worship services that supports the preaching of God's Word and receiving the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. This means overseeing areas such as music, tech stuff, planning, and more.

Yesterday I announced, on behalf of our church leadership, that we will be formally changing the starting time of our second worship service from 10:30am to 10:45am. Now, you may think, that's not such a big deal.

Or is it?

Well, for some it might be. For others it might not. But as I said yesterday, the reasons behind this move are more of a big deal, and I wanted to share them here on the blog, both to reinforce and to reach those who may not have been able to be with us yesterday.

Really, what we did yesterday was get honest with ourselves and formalize something we've been doing informally for a long time. It had become a culture around Concordia that, though we said our second service was at 10:30, it would never start until 10:35, :37, :40, or :42. This (maybe) worked fine if you knew the culture - at least you could prepare for it. But as you might imagine, there were also many problems with it. So after deliberation and conversation with our church leadership, I made the announcement yesterday that we are going to be more intentional about this.

The reasons for the change:

1. We need more time between services. This was the primary reason we were always starting "late". Our early service begins at 9:00, and gets done somewhere between 10:00 and 10:15. We need a good 1/2-hour to allow our early service folks to not feel rushed during the service - to not feel like they need to "hurry up" to get finished, to give them time to visit over coffee following the service, to change the music/sound setup, do sound check, etc. Trying to start the second service at 10:30 simply does not give us enough time for this to happen well.
2. We want to honor people's time. Saying we start at one time then always starting 10-15 minutes later isn't honest, and it doesn't respect people's time. It is true that we should not be approaching Sunday worship with an attitude of "I've got an hour to give to God. Can we get out of here "on time"? I've got places to go and people to see!" God deserves all of our time and attention, and our hearts are not turned to Him if that is our mindset.
   At the same time, God is not a God of disorder and confusion, especially in worship (1 Corinthians 14:26-40). Therefore we need to start at the time we specify, because doing otherwise leads to confusion, which detracts from worship as well.
3. (this could be 2a) We want to honour those who aren't "insiders". You probably know the problem of the inside joke: it only works for those "on the inside". Everyone else is left confused. In some ways, the same is true for church culture. As church leaders and members, we need to be sensitive to those who are not accustomed to "our" culture. Every week we have guests with us - perhaps other Lutherans from out of town, other Christians who are visiting, friends and family of our members. And so we need to not get caught up in "insider" culture at our guests' expense.
   (Now this doesn't mean that we change everything about what we do as "insiders" because some might not understand. But that's a topic for another post...)

So beginning next week, we will begin at 10:45. (Not 10:55 or 11:00 - the point isn't simply to push back the starting time to "10 minutes after whenever we say it is". ) If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to either comment below (if it's a comment you're ok with being public - I'll respond publicly too), or call or email me.

Though this may seem like a small thing, I think the reasoning behind it is important. We want to do all things at our church with intentionality as we hear the Word of God and respond to it with thanks and praise.