Eagles & Our Service Time

Mission affects everything about us – even what time our services will be this fall.

We’re hoping to move to weekly worship services beginning in September. As we do that, we want to keep our services in the afternoon for a short season. There’s two reasons for this. For one, some of the folks we’re trying to reach are churched unbelievers. That means they have a marginal commitment to a church already (showing up on Christmas, Easter, etc). They may not worship Jesus from faith, but they have a connection to religion and church. It may be too great of a jump for them to join a church plant (“what the heck is that?” would be their question) on Sunday mornings. However, they have been willing to check us out on Sunday afternoons. Sunday afternoons give these folks the freedom to check Seven Mile Road out without feeling like they’ve officially joined our church. We’ll eventually need to move to morning services, but it would be good to have a stretch of 3-4 months of weekly meetings in the afternoon where people could get a feel for Seven Mile Road before taking the plunge and making this their church. This also allows us to keep our commitment to St. Marks where I preach on Sunday mornings. This will continue until December and then we’ll rethink the whole thing with them.

So then, the question is, what time in the afternoon/evening? And this is where the Eagles come in.

With the football season coming up (which I can’t wait for!), we’ve got a decision to make. On the one hand, we want people to love Jesus more than the Eagles and come to see that worshiping God with His people is more satisfying that sitting on the couch. And so that’s what we’d tell the Christians at Seven Mile Road. We’d tell them to buy TiVo and come to church because Jesus is better.

But we’re not planting this church just to gather Christians. We want people who don’t know Jesus to gather with us. We want people who would skip church for a million reasons, let alone the Eagles, to gather with us. If the Eagles are such a huge part of our Philadelphia culture, and they are, would it make sense to have service battle this “untouchable” part of the week? What time would best help us connect with people in Northeast Philadelphia?

So the question we’re asking our group to think through is this: For your friends who you are planning to invite to Seven Mile Road, would the Eagles game affect their decision of whether or not to come to service?

So we’re thinking through all this right now. Pray that we would move ahead in a way that honors God and missionally engages our context.

As a side, even if we do move our service to 5pm, there are still three late afternoon games this season. Personally, I’m praying that Sunday, November 1 is our most attended service. The Eagles play the Giants that day…at 4:15.