Considering the Second Service

The Reformed heritage has a long history of a 2nd service.  In the Westminster Directory of Public Worship it uses the term “meetings”, implying both a morning and evening service (sometimes practiced as the afternoon service).  This is the topic for the last chapter of Recovering the Reformed Confession by R. Scott Clark.

My Ace Button

He begins with a good illustration of a family owned restaurant that must compete with the chain.  Will they continue to focus on quality and service, or will they focus on price and efficiency?  I saw this played out while working in an Ace Hardware store.  We competed against the newer, big box stores that moved into the area.  Ace focused on customer service.  This, not price, was going to be our advantage.  It would not take you 5 minutes to find a living, breathing person wearing the right colored shirt to help you.

As a smaller church, we have to focus on something different than the larger churches around us do.  We can’t have a zillion programs.  We have limited human and financial resources.  We have different “selling” points.  We offer community- knowing and being known.  We offer an opportunity to see the gospel go down deep, in part, through interaction with others.

Back to the 2nd service.  In the Dutch Reformed churches, it was usually a time to preach on the Heidelberg Catechism, or Scriptures using the Catechism as a guide.  They wanted people to get a balanced diet of exposition and systematic theology.

The 2nd service, Reformed church or not, has often been a tough sell.  In my youth, I attended Catholic Mass.  One service a week, and we had CCD (studying the Baltimore Catechism) during the week.  As a Baptist after my conversion, I became familiar with the evening service.  In the SBC in particular, it was like a proto-seeker model.  Evangelism was the focus on the morning service, and the committed Christians went to the evening service.  In some cases, communion was served at the evening service.  It was Willow Creek before there was Willow Creek (my assumption is that they did this long before Willow Creek came into existence with the seeker service).  As a result, people like me who worked Sunday evenings (necessary work is permitted- I worked at a homeless shelter, they don’t suddenly have a place to sleep on Sunday), were cut off from the sacrament (which is a means of grace).

This evening service was the only service I was asked to preach in (the one time they broke down and asked me to preach after I switched jobs).  I then discovered it was poorly attended.

Clark is very concerned over the increasing absence of 2nd services in Reformed churches.  He thinks this points to our need to recover the means of grace and the Sabbath.

I took an exception at my examination regarding the Sabbath, as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith.  I hold that recreation is not prohibited by Scripture.  But I believe that the Day of Rest (what Sabbath means) and worship are essential to our well-being.  We need to worship and rest, regularly.  Our worship should not wear us out though.

Both of my pastorates have been churches in which the congregation has been geographically spread out.  Some people travel 30-40 minutes each way to attend worship.  We do not want to place a burden on people that Jesus does not place on them.  The time in Sunday School (I still want a cooler name that points to discipleship not education) often serves the function of the 2nd service in the Dutch Reformed tradition.  And the early Reformed churches didn’t have Sunday School until the 19th century.  This “innovation” is a different way of accomplishing the same goals.

In our Community Groups (every other Sunday) we have meals together, study the Word together and pray together.  We are making use of a few of the means of grace in our groups.

Here is where we must make the distinction between biblical mandate, and how we have historically fulfilled that mandate.  We must maintain the former, but not the latter.  Our congregation celebrates the Lord’s Supper each week.  We enjoy Word and Sacrament, and the other means of grace, each time we gather to worship.  We are not robbing our people of the God ordained, ordinary means of grace.  We are complying with Scripture, but not necessarily with “tradition”.  The 2nd service is a way to comply with Scripture, but not a necessary way to comply with Scripture.  We have not fallen pray to mysticism and/or pietism as he suggests.

So, Clark seems to be arguing more for form than function.  He wants us to obey in a particular way, unnecessarily binding the conscience.  He is right to suggest that we need to disrupt the siren call of our culture and its never-ceasing stimuli (internet, TV, etc).  We all might do well to rest from them as well.

Part of what concerns me in his discussion of public vs. private spiritual disciplines is the false dilemma.  For instance, does “pray continually” mean to be in public worship continually?  The public and private are meant to be woven together in the life of the Christian.  We are to hear the Word preached, but also to read the Word at home (and in groups).  Otherwise our exposure to the Word is unduly limited to the sermon texts.  Prayer in the public worship is a means of grace, and instructs people how to pray privately.

We do not need either public or private worship.  We need both!  While he criticizes some who advocate private worship, he assumes they advocate the neglect of public worship.  Since he’s opposing them, you’d think he’d throw that out there too.  He does the opposite.

“In this treatise (Of Communion with the God), in which Owen meditated on the nature of the Christian’s fellowship with each of the trinitarian persons, and which gave considerable attention to the subjective religious experience of the Christian, he did not reckon that such occurs outside the divinely ordained objective means of grace.”

I suspect he overstates the case, as though Owen didn’t approve of the Puritan prayer closet or personal reading of the Scriptures.  The Puritans embraced both the public and private worship/devotion that we see in Scripture.  What we probably see in the Westminster Standards is the growth of individualism that we experience today (he wants to contextualize the chapter on Creation, shouldn’t we also contextualize the chapters on worship?).  Some were abusing the priesthood of believers to think they did not need the public worship.  And we know they were combating Anabaptist tendencies to denigrate the objective means of grace for mystical means.  Some abandoned public worship as unnecessary, just as some are doing now.  The answer is not the opposite extreme.  We must encourage both public and private worship, not one at the expense of the other.

As congregations in the midst of a consumeristic culture, we do need to compete with churches offering freedom from Word and Sacrament, as well as the non-church, privitized experience others seek.  We offer meaningful, gospel-shaped public worship with the means of grace in addition to encouraging personal (and family) worship.  We offer a healthy form of Christian spirituality- not formalism, not pietism, not mysticism, not moralism … but biblical spirituality.