Our Sunday series on evening worship continues.
For most of my growing up years my family observed the Sabbath day with some degree of rigor. Watching TV was prohibited, even Sunday evenings after we got back from the vesper service first at Alger Park Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. Then starting when I was seven at Ada Christian Reformed Church in Ada, Michigan.
Curiously, sometime in 1976 we got our first color TV set and somehow the advent of that lifted the ban on watching TV Sunday evenings. The Wonderful World of Disney then became OK to watch after the evening service, though no explanation for the change was ever suggested.
We never got the Sunday edition of The Grand Rapids Press either. That was a bummer since that was the one day of the week when the expanded comics section featured the comics in color. I asked my Mom about this once and she gave me the answer I suspect her mother may have given her: “We have the Bible to read on Sundays so we don’t need the newspaper.” Of course, we did not actually spend our Sundays reading the Bible so that answer did not make a lot of sense to me. It sounded sufficiently pious, however, that I did not dare to question it. Now if only the Bible had come with color comics . . .
We never missed the evening service at Ada CRC unless winter weather made heading out onto the rolling hills of Honey Creek Drive unwise. I don’t recall complaining much about the second service. On one Sunday I did ask Dad if we could just stay home. What he said in reply I do not fully recall but it had something to do with all the silly stuff we made time for during the rest of the week—probably he had in mind all the reruns of Star Trek I watched—so surely another hour in the house of the Lord should be no problem. Again, that’s the kind of answer even a 10-year-old knows better than to disagree with or even display mild disappointment over. Shortly thereafter we were in our pew at church.
We never used the word “liturgy” in those days. We just had our standard Order of Worship for the morning and the evening, both pre-printed on the back of the bulletin and followed without alteration week after week. The second service was not substantially different than the morning service, though I don’t think we repeated the “Confession of Sin/Assurance of Pardon” and instead we recited The Apostles Creed.
Back in the 1970s we also paid no heed to the Church Year. Words like “Lent” and “Epiphany” and “Advent” were ones I would learn only many years later. After I became an ordained minister in Fremont, I subscribed to Reformed Worship. One day the issue covering Epiphany arrived in the mail and I remember asking my wife if she knew what—as I pronounced it—“epee-fanny” was! Honestly, I got through four years at Calvin Seminary without ever encountering much about the Church Year.
As Deb Rienstra recalled a couple of weeks ago, the Psalter Hymnal numbers (the blue PH) for the services were always on the Hymn Board off to one side of the pulpit platform. The white numbers on the black background told us where to turn as the service proceeded. (Right next to that display was a light on the wall which lit up red when the Ada Fire Department got a call. A lot of volunteer firefighters went to Ada CRC, including my Dad, and when that light lit up, quite a few men got up quickly to leave. Sometimes I wished I could have gone with Dad!) It was a smaller group in the evenings than in the mornings, though in those days it was still a respectable gathering. I remember taking note of the people who were generally not present for the second service and feeling slight twinges of envy. Slight.
Flash forward a couple decades and now I was a pastor serving at Second Christian Reformed Church in Fremont, Michigan, for three years and then at Calvin CRC in Grand Rapids for twelve years. There were times I confess when it felt like it took more effort than it should have for me to get myself out the door around 5:30pm in both congregations. But once I got there, I enjoyed the second service each week. At Calvin Church the crowd was substantially smaller than in the morning, but even in that large sanctuary the vesper service had an intimate feel to it.
That smaller gathering also allowed for me to walk down the center aisle to take prayer requests from people ahead of the evening Congregational Prayer. I knew better than to hand people a live microphone because you never knew what they might say. Before repeating their request through the sound system, I paraphrased the request to blunt any political edges or inelegant phrasings that now and again came through someone’s words. Once in a while I spied some sly smiles on the faces of the people who heard what the person actually said versus how I then put it! I really enjoyed taking these prayer requests, writing each one down on a 3×5 index card so I could be sure to pray for it. I even developed a kind of shorthand to get requests down expeditiously (“CA” was cancer, for instance. “TX” was for thanksgiving).
The second service also provided me with an opportunity to preach some extended sermon series. It took almost a year to get through Genesis and a good chunk of another year to get through Exodus. Whether or not it was true, some people said that there were many weeks when the vesper service sermon was better than the morning one. People enjoyed doing an extended deep dive into a given biblical book. The evening attenders at both congregations I served were very intent listeners.
These days I’m often on the road fairly early on Sunday mornings to go serve as a guest preacher somewhere. Only rarely am I asked to do an evening service anymore. My own current congregation does a variety of things in the evening, including a second service held in a different setting than the morning service. There are fellowship meals, potlucks, and educational sessions. I’ll confess we don’t get to those very often.
And as noted above for this RJ series, there are not many second services still being held, even in pretty traditional congregations. Many second services were discontinued before COVID, but I also gather in a lot of places the pandemic’s disruption spelled the end of the second service.
As I have shared here, I have a lot of memories of those services at Ada CRC and as a pastor in Fremont and Grand Rapids. And they are warm memories at that.
One Response
Although all my relatives were CRC, and I have a faint childhood memory of sitting in the back of Third Church, Paterson with my grandparents, I was twelve when I had my second real experience of CRC worship, and that was the Northside CRC of Passaic (meeting in a public school auditorium during its flight to Clifton). I was amazed by that pre-printed Order of Service in the bulletin. Unchanging, without the specifics of the day! Two columns, for the Morning on the left and the Evening on the right, so that you could fold the bulletin in half for only the column you needed, and you could fit it nicely in the inside pocket of your suit jacket. Safe, secure, predictable, eternal, no innovations needed or expected, thank you very much.