Sunday School on Sunday nights

[Barb Bouldrey]

Our church is in the process of deciding to try some changes in our schedule. We are considering moving Sunday School hour to Sunday nights and just having worship on Sunday mornings. We are a congregation that runs in the 80's in attendence.

We are not going to cell groups that meet in homes. We would be meeting in our current classrooms for a Sunday School lesson. The teens, children and young adults may do a program format that is not the traditional Sunday School lesson with Sunday literature from NPH.

Anyway, I would like input from those of you who are currently doing Sunday School other than before worship on Sunday mornings.

Do your adult classes use the regular NPH Word Action materials?

We realize we might lose some of our current S.S. attenders, for a while, but expect them to come try it. We are hoping to bring in more young adults for Sunday evening that now just come for worship.

The board will be making their initial decisions on this next week. I would like some input from you to share with John ahead of time.

Barb

[Alisa Stoll]

A previous church I attended went to that format - the biggest problem was the number of times they didn't have S.S. - seemed to diminish it somehow. It's a holiday - no evening S.S., it's camp meeting - no evening S.S., we are having special guests in, instead - no S.S., etc. I guess when you cancel an evening preaching service it doesn't seem so bad because you had one in the morning. But S.S. is the time for setting a foundation of Bible knowledge and many from that church are now lacking parts of that foundation.

When we went to two services we considered evening S.S., the sandwich model, and the flip-flop model. We ultimately decided on flip-flop.

As to adult S.S. classes, we have one that does the NPS literature and 3 that use other materials (all reviewed and approved by the S.S. board).

My mother-in-law was very impressed with the holiness package of lessons that the denomination had for review at convention. It covered the entire church and might be a good kick-off for something new.

Alisa

[Mark Doble]

Aprox. 90% or our congregation attends S.S. now.

We moved S.S. to after the morning service.

Morning service is at 10am-11am
Fellowship/Coffee time11am-11:15am
SS starts at 11:15am-12:15am
Fellowship/Coffee time 12:15 to ?

Mon. every other, youth bible study 4-22 kids
Mon. small group
Wed. evening corporate prayer 6-16
Sun. evening corporate prayer 5-20
Tues. small groups
Thurs. small groups
Fridays off
Sunday Youth attendance ranges from 10-65

Average Sunday morning service attendance is about 120

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

I suggest moving carefully here -- is there any reason you couldn't do a test run, maybe in July and August? Some churches seem to have good success with this sort of thing, but for others I ends up killing the S.S.

If you do it as a trial for a couple of months, it will be easier to move it back if you want to.



Our church is in the process of deciding to try some changes in our schedule. We are considering moving Sunday School hour to Sunday nights and just having worship on Sunday mornings. We are a congregation that runs in the 80's in attendence.

We are not going to cell groups that meet in homes. We would be meeting in our current classrooms for a Sunday School lesson. The teens, children and young adults may do a program format that is not the traditional Sunday School lesson with Sunday literature from NPH.

Anyway, I would like input from those of you who are currently doing Sunday School other than before worship on Sunday mornings.

Do your adult classes use the regular NPH Word Action materials?

We realize we might lose some of our current S.S. attenders, for a while, but expect them to come try it. We are hoping to bring in more young adults for Sunday evening that now just come for worship.

The board will be making their initial decisions on this next week. I would like some input from you to share with John ahead of time.

Barb

[Billy Cox]

The church I attend used to have SS on Sunday evening. There are two downsides to be aware of.

1. As someone else has mentioned, it frequently gets pre-empted by other things. That isn't such a big deal with adult classes, but children's curriculum assumes that the class meets 52 weeks per year.

2. There is some resistance to making a separate trip to the church for a 45-50 minutes Sunday School class. The church beefed up the evening program by adding a short worship set and food.

The program was very well attended, but was eventually abandoned in favor of small groups for adults and Sunday School for children on Sunday morning. It was difficult to have a separate time slot for Sunday School as well as for small groups.

The thing that I appreciated most about it was that Sunday morning was about worship...period. The stress level for workers was far lower and young families seemed to like the Sunday evening time slot for Sunday School.

[Wilson L. Deaton]

We are not doing this right now but have done it in one of my other churches. Everyone who came really liked it that way. It was very positive. However, as you predicted we have a subgroup who would come to SS then stay for worship but when we seperated them they wouldn't come back a second time so our SS did suffer for that reason. At the time we felt that SS was important enough that we wanted that subgroup attending so after a few months we moved it back.

Wilson

[Larry Osweiler]

We surveyed our folks three years ago about doing Sunday School on Sunday nights. They were overwhelmingly against it for a few reasons:
1. Most of our people live over 5 miles from the church and didn't want to make a special trip back to church on Sunday night.
2. The weather here in Michigan can be a factor in the winter time. Most of our senior adults don't like to drive when it's dark. And then the road conditions in the colder months can also be a factor.
3. Camping and the lakes are a big factor when it gets warm. Many of our folks RV and camp on the weekends. They go "up north" for the weekends and that really hits our SS and church attendance from about May - September.
We have had some churches who have gone to SS on Sunday nights around here and have not had very good success with it.
We had two good sized churches that did away with SS altogether and replaced it with cell groups. Within three years the cell groups disintegrated and now they can't get anyone to come to a cell group nor back to Sunday School. It was a disaster for the church.
I think it depends on your people and the culture of your area. It also depends on how strong your existing SS program is. I would definitely survey your people first.
The best SS program I ever had in a church was when we had worship first and SS following.

[Sara Sheppard]

We are a larger church. We now do 2 services w/ ss in between. This means SS starts about 25 min. later than it used too when it was just SS then 1 worship service. From all that I can tell, our SS attendance is higher. Most people who come to 1st service go ahead and stay around for SS and those coming to 2nd service find that the slightly later starting time of SS has made it easier for them to make it too on Sunday mornings.

I have been in a church that did SS at night and it just didn't work. In fact, I think it hurt their sunday morning attendance as well - although I'm not sure of that. I know it didn't always seem "worth the hassel" of getting up and ready and out the door on Sunday morning for 1 hour. I know that's probably not the right attitude but it does seem odd for families to spend an hour plus in the mornings getting ready and driving to church to spend 1-1.5 hours there.

Here is another thought Barb. Currently, you have SS (1 hour) then AM service (probably 1-1.5 hrs) then an evening service (1 hour). At this point, aren't you in effect removing the evening service and just moving SS. Have you thought about just doing away with Sunday evening service and beefing up the AM time. I know some people are really against that. But, if it comes down to quality and not quanity and families are so strapped for time...then making a strong push for SS in the AM and then leaving Sunday evenings open for family time could produce more quality all the way around (at church and in homes). Even as a single person, I have found having my Sunday evening free has really given me more time to spend with my family (I usually have dinner with my parents and nephew). For some of my friends who work and have a family too - they have said that Sunday evening has become one of their favorite times of the week as they and their children have a large block of time together with nothing eles on the calendar (which so rarely happens during the week). Its just a thought. I know lots of churches struggle with doing away with Sunday night service...but I think I've really mostly seen good come from it. We still have a small service that meets on Sunday nights, but it is usually "ran" by someone other than the pastor and to be honest, it tends to be older retired folks. Usually about one Sunday night a month, someone hosts a fellowship in their home on Sunday nights. So, I think it has not only increased rest time, family time, but also fellowship within the church.

Just my thoughts!

Sara

[Betty Bolerjack]

1. As someone else has mentioned, it frequently gets pre-empted by other things. That isn't such a big deal with adult classes, but children's curriculum assumes that the class meets 52 weeks per year.


We know of a church here in the OKC area that has been doing Sunday night Sunday School for quite some time now. Some of our family attend there. They all seem to like it, but it does get pre-empted occasionally. What I've seen of the children's curriculum, I'm not overly crazy about anyway, but I'm not sure that it would be that negatively affected. However, for anyone interested in looking at a totally different way to do Sunday School for children, explore the Workshop Rotation Model (http://www.rotation.org/) for Sunday School. We have been doing this for the past several months at Crown Heights with some degree of success, but on Sunday morning. However, it would easily adapt to Sunday night also which we have talked about doing. No worry about curriculum because you either write your own or adapt what is available on the Rotation website. If a special Sunday night event is being planned, then you would just plan your lessons around it. Very easy to do.

The thing that I appreciated most about it was that Sunday morning was about worship...period.

We have visited the above mentioned church and this is one of the things I liked about it, too. There wasn't the rush to finish up the SS lesson and get to the sanctuary for the service. I think it does make for a better worship experience.

[Jim Franklin]

A church where I used to be a member tried Sunday evening SS for a few weeks and that is all it took to recognize that it was a "no go" for that congregation. This church was near a Nazarene college and we had a lot of students coming for morning SS on a bus the church provided but would not come in the evening, attendance dropped off drastically when we tried Sunday evening SS. We then went to the aforementioned sandwich format with a Worship service, SS and a second Worship service and that caught people from both worship service groups and instead of 75 attending SS in a congregation of over 400 we had SS attenance of about 300 or more. Sometimes a congregation needs to experiment just to find out what they like and will respond to for the best results.

[Mike Norris]

...We began Sunday Night SS 4 years ago . We were out of space for SS and Morning Worship services and needed to make some changes in our service times. We also faced a severe parking problem. The only format that seemed to answer all our needs was to move to 2 morning services and evening Sunday School.
After 4 years experience , I have found that evening Sunday School has some advantages and some pronounced disadvantages:
1. Young Adults who would not come out for a Sunday Night church services have responded strongly to evening Sunday School. We seldom had 4-5 couples attending our Sunday night church services......we now have 3 young adult SS classes.....with an average attendace of 70( total). Most of the adult classes enjoy the extra time for fellowship and study.
2. Evening SS.....much to our surprise.....is more difficult for children teachers. Children are tired from all day activities.....and it is sometimes difficult to keep their interest for the extended SS time in the evening.
3. We have a strong Senior Adult class that I allowed to continue to meet on Sunday mornings. Some of those folks do return and attend a different class in the evening. Most don't.
4. Sunday nights have allowed us to better utilize our building........and has opened some classrooms for new classes to begin. Also....we do have a couple of classes that now meet off campus in homes.
5. Summer is terrible for evening SS. People take time for their family.....and we really do struggle in the summer.
6. We limit the number of times each year that we dismiss SS. WE look at the calendar at the beginning of each year and inform the teachers in advance of those dates when we will dismiss. Most years we will not allow dismissal more than about 3-4 times.
7. Evening SS is not a "cure all" for SS woes. I think that if a church is considering making that move, that it be taken in conjunction with a move to 2 morning worship services at the same time.
8. I disagree with Scott on one point. I don't believe that a church should
" try out " evening SS for a few weeks to see if it will work. There will usually be strong opposition to a move to evening SS.....and if it is presented as a " trial" .....the opposition will make sure that it will fail.