One of the most conspicuous continued signs at Joy that things aren’t “back to normal” is that we’ve continued to have just a single Sunday worship service at 9:30am ever since we went online-only almost exactly two years ago. It’s harder to pin down our viewership on Facebook than it was with Zoom, but we may have about half as many people watching online as we have in-person on any given Sunday, a number that continues to fluctuate.
We want to be clear that online worship is still definitely just as much worship as it has ever been–indeed, we’d love to figure out how to make the online experience even more interactive, and our Mission Endowment Fund has helped us invest in making that a better, more permanent option.
Meanwhile, like so many churches across the country we’ve had lower worship attendance and a lot of worn-out volunteers stepping back or stepping aside, even as we’ve been fortunate to have some step up well beyond the call of duty and others step forward anew to help out.
So it has made sense to stay with one service on Sundays. We had a nice crowd at two different services on Christmas Eve, but those are always some of the most highly anticipated and attended services of the year, buttressed by large extended families, even as many of our “regulars” are elsewhere with their own extended families.
But consistently I’ve gotten feedback that folks miss “their” worship time, and even that some will return precisely when their service time returns. And certainly if we experience any more pandemic waves (we hope not but can’t know for sure) it’s always better to have fewer people spread out in a space.
So, we’re going to try an experiment for seven weeks starting on Easter Sunday: our old familiar schedule of worship at 8:30 and 11am with Sunday school in between, until Memorial Day, when historically we would switch to a single service at 9:30am again for the summer anyway. We’ll see how it goes! If you’ve been waiting for “your” time slot–it’s time to vote with your feet, and we’ll be glad to see you in person!
Pastor Jon
