It's all about the weekend

From Preaching.com

In a recent edition of his Leadership Uncensored newsletter, Ed Young, Jr., reminded pastors: "At Fellowship, our favorite saying is, 'It's all about the weekend.' Why? Because throughout scripture, the value of corporate worship is hammered home again and again — that's huge. Also, the weekend is the biggest port of entry into your church. That's where most of the guests and visitors show up. So, to make an indelible impression on the most people, you've got to have the weekend hitting on all cylinders.

"Here are some of the ways we've stayed weekend-focused at Fellowship Church:

"1. Put weekend preparation at the top of your day. Personally, I keep the weekend the main thing by making it the first thing of my day. The most difficult thing that I do is thinking about, researching, and praying for the messages — it's very taxing. If I don't jump on that in the morning, I won't have the energy I need to do it justice.

"2. Make the weekend a priority in your spending. If you really want to know what is the most important thing in your church, look at where you're spending the resources. If you are spending more money on stuff that has nothing to do with the weekend, then you're off balance and you're not focused on what's most important. The majority, I think, of funding, resources, and staffing should go towards the weekend.

"3. Give the weekend serious attention during staff meetings. During our weekly Executive Team meetings, what are we spending most of our time talking about? The weekend. We talk about it, we critique last weekend, we compare numbers, and discuss what went well, and what didn't go well. Then we look at the next weekend and target what we can do to make it a better weekend. Of course we talk about other stuff that's happening in the church but we keep our top staff people focused on the weekend." (For more from Ed, visit www.creativepastors.com. And don't miss Ed's article on "Communicating with Creativity" in the May-June issue of Preaching magazine (www.preaching.com).)
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While we would all love to say that our church isn't a church where people only come on weekends, the truth be told, most people are only in our churches on weekends. Certainly in smaller churches this is less the norm, but bigger churches definately have a large group that come once a week, only for an hour or two. Ed's model works well for growing churches that are regularly bringing in new people. Churches that have stagnated tend to spend less time/money/effort on the Sunday/weekend services. I do think many churches would be well served to examine their priorities and to give more thought/time/money to their efforts on the weekends, mine included.