Reasons for change

Change simply for the sake of change is not a good thing. Tradition has value, and one does not overthrow tradition on a whim. At the same time, change does happen, and when people change, it is important to recognize that, and make adjustments that are within the scope of what God has commanded. For many years the tradition has been to have Sunday School on Sunday morning before the Worship Service. In our church, we ultimately abandoned Sunday School for children, since we had so few of them, but we still had an adult Sunday School class. In recent years, even that has been attended by fewer and fewer people. Yet the need for Christian Education has not lessened, it has probably increased. So how can we meet this need? We have decided to test a new format in the hopes that it will encourage more participation in knowing and understanding the Word of God. We are going to drop the Adult Sunday School class before the Worship Service, and instead begin the Worship Service a little earlier, at 10:15 AM. We will have our Worship Service first, and then we will have a break of 10 or 15 minutes, and then we will have a discussion of the message, seeking to answer questions that people may have, clarify things that were not understood, and share insights and applications that people may have had in response to the message. People are, of course, free to go before the discussion time if they wish, but our hope is that you will stay and participate, because we believe that it will be of real value for you to do so. We expect the discussion to last about 30 minutes, but we do not want to limit it, so if some people leave, but there are those who want to continue the discussion, we are fine with that too. We want to be flexible, to meet needs without imposing on people's time. Sometimes, if there is not a lot of discussion, we might end things earlier, and at others, if there is a great deal of discussion, and a lot of interest in learning more, we might continue on, with people being free to go when they need to. Our desire is to meet the needs of God's people. If we can get folks who are willing to help with it, we would be delighted to provide instruction for children separately during this discussion time, especially since we have many more kids than we used to have, and their instruction is as important as that for the adults. Our hope is that this format will prove valuable to all and encourage greater knowledge and understanding of God's precious Word. If it fails in that goal, we can always go back to what we did before, but we believe that there will be many benefits and value to this new way of doing things. We would welcome your input as we experiment with this.