Sunday Evening Service - What is essential?

When I was called to stay here at Antwerp, given the blessing of the leadership, and was making my rounds meeting with people in the church to talk with them about me being the minister at this church, I met with one individual. This individual presumed I was meeting with them to ask them to support the campus ministry I thought I was going to just a few weeks before. (Isn't it crazy how trying to follow God makes us appear wishy-washy at times?) [sorry for the somewhat bad grammar but I prefer to keep this gender neutral].

Anyway, when I sat down and began talking with this individual about staying in Antwerp to be the minister, they shared that they would not have been able to support me being a campus minister. This person's reason? Because I was not a supporter of the Sunday evening gathering. I did not attend it regularly, and I was on record as saying that it was no longer useful at meeting any pertinent goal.

So here I was, possibly going to minister to the most unreached segment of American culture, the college student, and this person would not have been willing to support that ministry because I did not participate regularly in the Sunday evening gathering.

What's important? Ministering to the most unreached people group in America or attendance at the Sunday evening gathering? There would be good reasons to not support me as a missionary to college students. One could think that I would not be capable of ministering to them. One could think that too much of the money would go to overhead in the organization I was going with. They could desire to send their money to another missionary. Or they could say that they just did not have the extra money to support a missionary at this time. There are legitimate reasons beyond those.

But I would say that one's view of the Sunday evening gathering should play no part in whether we support a missionary or not. I do not know the view on the Sunday evening gathering of any of the missionaries that we support. If we make our criteria go so far down the list of what a person believes as to include their view on Sunday evening gatherings as an essential, then I think we have made a list that is much too lengthy. What would not be an essential with such a lengthy list?

I could not verify it, but the following seems to be the only reason that I could find on the origins of the modern Sunday evening service. Sunday evening church was started in the late 1800s, early 1900s, because people wanted to sit under artificial light. It was a new novelty, and people were willing to come and listen to a Gospel message because of it. I would say, go ahead and start a Sunday evening service if it would provide a gate for people to hear the message of Jesus. Whatever we can do that is not compromising the Gospel and will allow us to share the message of Christ, we should do that. We are already doing those types of things all of the time; the question we need to ask is whether they are effective. If not, we need to discard them quickly.

Sunday evening service did not originally pop up, as many state, to give farmers who had to work in the morning an opportunity to go to church. Although that could have been the reason used in some communities to maintain the ritual. We no longer believe attendance in mass is necessary for one's salvation. If someone has to miss the morning service because of work, health, or some other means, it does not mean they cannot get plugged into a small group or a ministry. They can still be part of the fellowship in practices that actually provide fellowship.

Once a practice that is not an essential loses its effectiveness at drawing new people in, we should focus on the tried and true things, like bringing the Gospel to them through loving actions. Maybe inviting friends over to our house and sharing an evening of fun. Maybe going out and helping someone with the extra two hours we have saved. Maybe spend time playing games with one's family. Maybe spending that time in prayer. There are certain things that never lose effectiveness, and these should be the things we are primarily focused on.

Frank Viola quotes J.C. Ryle in the beginning of his book Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices:

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

Losing a Grandma and Struggling with God - This Physical Facade is not Spiritual Reality - Death

I reacted poorly when my Grandma Jessie died. Like most people, I loved my grandma. She used to make the best parched corn, would crack walnuts for me, let me drink out of her old metal cup, pick cherries and raspberries with me, and give me butterscotch mints. Having grown up across the street from her house, I spent a few hours there most everyday. I took many naps on that couch on which this picture was taken. But after a long battle with melanoma, she died. Instead of growing closer to God, which she would have wanted, I hardened my heart toward Him.

I was fifteen when she died. I should have been old enough to handle it properly, but I didn't. Like many people who struggle with God after the death of someone, I had a faith that did not properly understand death and suffering.

My father shared with me a similar story of struggling with God over death. He had prayed for his father to stop drinking, but his father never did. He eventually died of liver problems when my father was twenty-one. From that point until much later in his life, he stopped living his life for God, a God who he felt did not answers his prayers for his father to be delivered from alcoholism.

Death. It's not just a destroyer of life; it can also be a destroyer of faith.

Two Sundays ago, Diane Schuler, 36, of West Babylon, New York, was driving her two children and her three nieces home from a weekend camping trip in Sullivan County when she inexplicably entered the northbound Taconic going south. While we were sitting around enjoying and sharing a meal with friends, tragedy destroyed two families.

The result was the worst accident in Westchester County in 75 years. Killed with Schuler were four children in her car and three men from Yonkers in an SUV. The only survivor was Schuler’s five year old son Bryan. Dead were Emma Hance, 9, Alison Hance, 7, and Kate Hance, 5, along with the driver, 36-year old Diane, and her two-year old daughter, Erin.

In the eulogy, Warren Hance, the mourning father of the three children, stated, “Love your children. Cherish your children. Kiss your children. And do not forget . . .” I cannot fathom his pain, and it’s seems almost shallow to say in his hurt, but Jesus would say the same message to him that he says to us during our struggles: “Stay faithful to me even through the pain.”

When the physical world around us does not equal spiritual truth, we need to never give in to the physical facade. Death will come. Jesus warned that his death would come (John 13: 18-19, John 14:28-29, John 16:1-4). John ended the book with the warning that his death would come (John 21:20-23). They both encouraged people to not lose faith because of death. The physical laws of this world cannot contain God. When Jesus died on the cross, the resurrection was not far behind.

The disciples did not have the hindsight after the crucifixion that the completed Gospel gives. Before the resurrection, physical reality controlled them. They were expecting a physical kingdom that would take over the nations of the world. They were expecting Jesus to be the emperor that united the world under the banner of Israel. They had forgotten that the warnings of Jesus concerning his death and the prayer in which Jesus taught them to pray.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught them to pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). His kingdom is partly here and his will is partly here, but it is trying to break through more and more. Each of us should be about living in the spiritual reality, transforming the physical façade around us into that reality as much as we are able. We need to live in the resurrection where the limitations of this world have no hold.

It took the resurrection and the Holy Spirit to give the apostles the boldness to stand firm and bring about about God’s kingdom and his will. After the crucifixion and before the resurrection, Peter denied Jesus despite faithfully following him and adamantly proclaiming him the Messiah before his death. The physical death of Jesus destroyed all of their dreams of what they thought was going to happen. Those dreams were crushed on Golgotha. But the resurrection gave these guys the strength to stand up for what they knew was right no matter what life threw their way. And tragedy would come their way. Church history teaches that all of them, save John, were crucified just like Jesus. John was exiled to the island of Patmos.

Jesus gives us hope, hope to continue on when life seems to say we need to quit. He warned us that life will not be a bed of roses. We need to live in the promise that “all things” will be worked out for our good (Romans 8:28). Better days are ahead no matter what we are facing.

At my baptism in 1988, my Grandma Jessie gave me a Bible and wrote this in the inside cover.

Dear Grandson Regan,

“Lo – I am with you always.”

With the right attitudes and God’s help you can cope with anything.

Train yourself to think spiritually with hope and optimism and enthusiasm.

Shape your life in His love.

Much Love,

Grandma Snyder

Poem - The Calf Path

The Calf Path
by Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bellwethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made,
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed that zigzag calf about,
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They follow still his crooked way,
And lose one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.