Why Evening Worship?

From this coming Lord’s Day we will be bringing our evening service time forward an hour to the new time of 5:30pm. This was agreed in March, after consultation with the congregation, but we have been unable to implement it till now as Public Worship had been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As stated at the time:

Given our conviction that God is ‘worthy to be praised’ (Psalm 18:3), that public worship is to be preferred before private (Psalm 87:1), that ‘it is good…to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night’ (Psalm 92:2 – ‘A song for the Sabbath’) and that the whole of the Lord’s Day is to be kept holy (Exodus 20:8; Revelation 1:9), as well as the fact that the risen Lord Jesus is present in a special way when his word is preached (Romans 10:14; Ephesians 2:17; 2 Corinthians 5:20; 1 Thessalonians 2:13), that he repeatedly appeared to his disciples on the evening of the first day of the week (Luke 24:28-29; John 20:19, 26), and following the example of the early Christians who met on Lord’s Day evenings (Acts 20:7), we want to hold our Sunday services at times that everyone can attend, from the youngest through to the oldest.

In a day when many base the worship of God around their busy lives, we urge people to do the opposite - to base their lives around the worship of God.

Some helpful resources on the question of ‘Why evening worship?’ are below:

• Don’t Give up on the Evening Service (Kevin DeYoung)

• Being with Jesus at the Evening Service (Barry York)

• Why I love an Evening Service (Tim Challies)

• Whatever Happened to Evening Services? (Tim Challies)

• The return of Sunday night worship (Jesse Johnson, Cripplegate)

• 7 reasons for the death of Sunday evening worship (Jesse Johnson, Cripplegate)

• Let’s keep our Sunday Evening Worship (Paul H. Alexander - OPC)

• Why evening worship? (Reformation OPC)

• The Death of the Evening Service (Mark Jones)

• Children, The Family and the Church (David Robertson)

• A Pastor’s Reflections: Evaporating Evening Worship

• On Skipping the Second Service (John Newton)

• Why I love the Evening Service (And You Can Too) (Kevin DeYoung)

• The Blessing of Sunday Evening Worship (Mary Beth McGreevy)

• Does the Bible require Christians to attend Church? (Kevin DeYoung and Jason Helopoulos)

• Once or Twice? (Simon Arscott)

• Lord’s Day Worship x2 (Martyn Lloyd-Jones)

• Do you have to go twice? (David Gilbert)

• Why We Started Back an Evening Service (Kyle Sims, ARP)

• The Lord’s Day: Why go to church twice on Sundays?

“When you come into a half-empty sanctuary on a rainy Sunday evening, be encouraged! The gathering may look small and insignificant; in reality, it’s filled with those who sinlessly and ceaselessly worship God before his face.” - Megan Hill

Updated with articles from 2020:

• The Blessing of Evening Worship (H. P. McCracken, RPCNA)

2021 updates:

Romans in 40 minutes

This Lord’s Day morning we plan to begin a series in Romans chapter 8 (11:30am on facebook live).

In order to get up to speed on Romans (assuming you don’t have time to listen to all 15 sermons on chapters 1-7 preached back in 2018!), one very helpful recent resource is an address given by Sinclair Ferguson entitled Romans in 40 minutes. Ferguson has made Romans a lifetime study, and has around 150 commentaries on the book - and distills it all in this lecture given in August 2019.

Don’t miss him explaining his ‘profound commitment’ to evening worship around the 7 and a half minute mark - something we share, and which explains why we are livestreaming two services a week even in the midst of this pandemic.

Update: John Piper has a helpful summary of chapters 1-7 here.
Kyle Borg preached a sermon which covered the whole of Romans 8 and also has a blog post on preaching Romans as a young minister.