This is the first of seven-week series about Sunday evening worship, the second service. We’ve invited several writers to share memories, humor, critique, appreciation, and the legacy of this practice, now nearly vanished.

*****

It’s beyond belief. My smart speaker just told me that it’s -14 outside, but it feels like -21. Ain’t we got fun!

A year ago we were living out in the country; not exactly alone out there, but far more isolated, maybe a chilly crow or two to dot the landscape. We left the country when management of our acre became impossible. For the last half year, we’ve been residents of a neatly arranged senior housing unit, circled up out here on the edge of town like a wagon train. 

The warmth inside right now reminds me of the intimacy of “the second service,” or Sunday night worship, sixty years ago when I was a high school kid. When temps fall through the floor and flatland winds rip your face off, somehow being here, amid the fortress of elderly is preferable to the isolation of yawning open spaces. In some ways, it’s like the way I remember the “second service” — a quiet, close gathering, a cold world outside.

Think I’m a shameless romantic? Maybe. But I wouldn’t go back.

However, I do go back, as many of us do when air-lifted by a few notes of old songs or hymns we still might occasionally sing—though not often. For me, a certain doxology draws me from the church I’m in, and takes me back home–First Christian Reformed Church, Oostburg, Wisconsin, the second service. Just a few notes and I’m standing at the end of the bench, up front, east side, my parents’ harmony filling empty spaces between us and the pulpit. Outside it’s dark, but that old hymn brings me home.

My host is a metrical version of Psalm 72: “And blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen.” If you’re gone now from where you were just twenty seconds ago, you understand the call of an old doxology from a Puritan Psalter, Scottish in origin, that only slightly messes with the KJV:

Now blessed be the Lord our God, the God of Israel,
for he alone does wondrous works in glory that excels,
for he alone does wondrous works in glory that excels.

We start singing that short hymn, and I’m out of the building, sitting beside Mom and Dad in the church my imagination subtly darkens. Everything fits, everything works, and everything is somehow worthy.

Back then, my immediate future is mapped out–soon enough I’ll be off to college, to return home only rarely. I don’t know that I was ever that serious about faith again, before or after. When “Now Blessed” triggers dreams, the cold seems just outside the walls of the sanctuary. It wasn’t. Soon enough, for me, there’d be no way to look past the world and questions about my place in it.

And blessed be his glorious name to all eternity;
the whole earth let his glory fill; amen: so let it be;
the whole earth let his glory fill; amen: so let it be.

For a moment, however, I’m lost in a dream world that continues beyond those strapping double amens at the end. I’ll leave via the north door and walk home–we live only a block away–and I’ll take our ’64 Chevy, the only car Dad ever bought new, and drive down the road apace. Then pull up at the curb just outside the front door of another church in another lakeshore town, where, with another “amen,” I’m sure, a tall young lady will pull a strand of her long hair behind an ear and come out the front door, maybe even be first. She’ll come down the front sidewalk, open the car door, and climb in, then shimmy over to the middle of the seat.

My parents wouldn’t appreciate the turn I’ve just taken, the way I’m telling the story now; but part of the warm comfort of “the second service,” at least for me, is the sweet stuff that followed, all part of my ritual of evening worship in the days before–how can I say it?–before I’d come to what the hymnal used to call “the age of discretion,” when question marks outnumber exclamation points. 

The memories don’t leave right away. They hover, ghost-like, me somewhere within them.

A year later that young lady would be out of my life–no more Sunday night dates. A year later I would have read Emerson and Thoreau and Frederick Manfred, writers my parents never heard of. A year later guys my age, by the score, would be dying in rice paddies. 

On the first Sunday, the very first, of what would be a four-year stay at Dordt College, I went with a couple other brand-new freshmen guys, in suits, to worship with First Christian Reformed Church, Sioux Center, where we sat way up in the balcony, back row, because on Sunday nights back then the church was still packed.

I’ll never forget that Sunday night because I’d not before entertained the critical notion that there was more to crowded second services than beloved religiosity. Soon enough, I’d become someone I would not have imagined just a year before.

I don’t know that I went back to a second service, not often. I started again a decade later when my wife and I moved back to Sioux Center.  

A couple of years ago, Oostburg CRC asked me to celebrate their birthday with them, 150 years old–would I speak at their birthday party? 

I couldn’t turn it down. I told myself I was a good choice because if I worked at it, I could say that my great-great grandparents worshipped with the congregation I did.   

It was pure joy to walk through our collective history with them, but I learned with that trip so many years later that in some ways little had changed from those years I remember fondly, those years when our second services ended with that old Scottish doxology we rarely sing, today: “Now Blessed Be the Lord Our God.” I hear the opening chords and I’ve left the building.

My parents are long gone, and there were lots of folks I didn’t know. But the place still felt warm and familiar, the very same sanctuary during those long-ago Sunday evening services.

And it’s okay that some things haven’t changed. The truth is, I rather like it that way. Feels warm, like home.