Sometimes, less is more. As we prepare ourselves for going to two services this coming August, one of the things we want to do is make our service of worship shorter. Not only so, but we want to do this by disciplined arrangement, and not by chopping things off arbitrarily. In order to do this well, we will have to practice, and we are starting today. Our service normally goes for an hour and fifty minutes, and we are working on getting the services to fit within an hour and a half, one at 8 and the other at 10:30.
As we work on this over the course of the summer we are of course open to your ideas, and we invite them. We also want to continue to provide you with the information you need beforehand to prepare your family for worship—what songs we will be singing, and so forth.
Most of this will be done by shaving a minute or so off every element in the service. We will still have the psalm lesson, for example, but it will be shorter. To do this without losing too much, we would encourage you to take advantage of other opportunities during the week like the psalm sing (which is tonight incidentally).
Because our little ones are in the service with us, many of you with a passel of children should take special note of this. This is likely to throw everybody’s rhythm off, but because the result will be ending twenty minutes earlier, the adjustments should be simple.
And of course, for any who might believe that we ought not to abandon quantity, even in the pursuit of a more disciplined quality, you are certainly welcome to attend both services.