It’s amazing how quickly things change, and how little people seem to realise it. When I was a new Christian in the 1970s, almost every church that believed the Bible – and even some that didn’t – had a Sunday evening service.

In the past thirty to forty years, however, a great change seems to have swept over the western evangelical world. Many churches have abandoned evening worship; and those which still have it seem to have resigned themselves to the view that different demographics in their church family will attend at dif­ferent time slots – and thus their con­gregation becomes virtually two, or even three separate congregations meeting at different times in different “styles”. The amazing thing to me is that so few Christians seem to realise what a radical departure this is from many centuries of church history. One Christian even once told me that our (conservative) church was a radical innovator having such high (and unrealistic) expectations of church attendance as twice per Sunday. I had to prove to him by reference to the Scriptures and with evidence from church history that we are in fact only continuing what ordinary Christians have always done.

I guess, like most Anglicans, I only had to look inside my Prayer Book in my teenage years to realise that evening services were a time-honoured pattern of church life – there was an order of service for it, just like there was for morning worship, weddings, funerals and other special occasions. Hymn writers even wrote hymns especially for evening worship. Take this one by John Ellerton, which focuses our minds on the conti­nuity of Christians’ praises when, around the world, believers meet morning and evening:

The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest;
To Thee our morning hymns ascended,
Thy praise shall sanctify our rest.
We thank Thee that Thy church unsleeping,
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.

When I was converted, it didn’t surprise me that committed Christians generally attended evening services as well as morning ones. (Admittedly, in some churches the “youth” tended to regard the evening service as their opportunity to do their own thing; and increasingly, older people stayed away.)

Likewise during the early ‘80s, when I was a student in the U.S., the Presby­terian churches I was part of all held evening services; but because of their clear convictions about what constitut­ed reformed worship, they didn’t distin­guish between morning and evening in the pattern of their liturgy. It seems that since then, the pressure to drop evening services has affected many churches.

During the month of June my husband Paul and I were travelling in the U.S. visiting friends, and we were glad of the opportunity to attend their churches with them. But we found that only one of the four we visited had a whole­-church-family evening service, and that was poorly attended. It seemed that considerable effort was being made to “informalise” that one, too, probably to try and encourage more than the faithful few to be there. It was a sad and somewhat sobering experience to realise that Christians are fast giving up half of their opportunities to gather, worship and learn from the preaching of the Word.

But this trend is not universal, and there are churches and individuals who uphold the blessings of Sunday evening services. In January this year Toronto pastor and blogger, Tim Challies, made these observations on evening worship. He kindly gave me permission to include them here:

The original article from Faith in Focus reproduces Challies' blog entry in full. You may read it here: https://www.challies.com/articles/why-i-love-an-evening-service/