As New England sweltered in early July, Sunday mornings came and went without a single soul showing up for worship in the hot, stuffy sanctuary of First Congregational Church of Salem, N.H. Even the pastor stayed home.
But God wasn’t forgotten. Worship just waited until Wednesday evenings, when the cool comfort of the basement fellowship hall drew as many as 40 to sing and pray. That’s 50 percent more than the church attracted when it met on summer Sundays.
“If people take a break from worshipping, they sometimes don’t pick that habit back up,” said Owen Williams, a longtime deacon at First Congregational, a United Church of Christ congregation. But because Wednesdays keep people coming, “we have a depth of commitment throughout the year.”
We do out Children’s Church on Wednesday evenings and not Sunday mornings. It works pretty well. We get a much better turn out.
If Sunday morning is too hot, then why not Sunday night?
Or Saturday night?
Or how about we respect the wisdom of the first Christians in celebrating on the day on which our Lord was Resurrected, symbolic of the first day of a new creation, and bend our desires to his.
Hasn’t the UCC modified other scriptural guidance to ‘fit’ the secular needs of our times?
So, its no surprise that a UCC church would modifiy one of the Ten Commandments.
Possibly for many in the UCC, the Ten Commandments might be the ‘Ten Options.’
And isn’t the UCC ‘road’ the same road now being traveled by the secularists who have taken control of ECUSA?
RE: 5…
To be fair, the third commandment of the Decalogue refers to the “seventh day” as the Sabbath, that is Saturday. After being kicked out of the synogague, Christians altered this commandment so that instead of going to synagogue on Saturday and meeting on Sunday, they met only on Sunday, “the Lord’s Day,” the day of the resurrection, the eighth day, and symbolic start of a new creation. This is not to argue for or against worship services on days other than Sunday…just to be honest about the fact that Christians have long abjured from the Third Commandment. That is unless you happen to be Seventh Day Adventists…