Our new schedule - 3 services in 1 morning!

[TongBlack]

Alright, so, this thread is not so much to ask a question as to hopefully help out people in the future who are looking to fit in more services. When we first began looking at adding a third worship service to our Sunday mornings, we didn't have a lot of resources to help us get started. Hopefully this might help the next church that needs to do it.

Alright, so, our church runs 550-650 in small groups (probably 700-1000 in our worship services). We are a Southern Baptist church, if that's relevant at all.

Our previous schedule was thus:
Blended worship service (orchestra and choir/praise team) 8:30-10:00
Contemporary worship service (praise band) 10:30-12:00
Small group session 1 8:30-10:00
Small group session 2 10:15-11:45

We were running out of small group space, so we needed to create more. Undergoing a building program was not feasible, so we began to look at doing a third service.

A lot of discussion went into this (obviously), and some tough decisions were made. Among them was our choice to cut the services from 90 minutes to 70. We used to have roughly 25-30 minutes for music, 50 minutes of preaching and the other 10-15 minutes as devoted to offering, announcements and whatever else we needed to do that particular Sunday morning. Our layout now is 25 minutes of music and 35 minutes of preaching, with 10 minutes to fit in the rest. Cutting 15 minutes off of the sermon was not something we easily decided, as we did not want to follow the trend of simply preaching a "sermonette." The pastor ultimately decided that as long as the content is there, that is plenty of time for a sermon.

Our new schedule is:
Blended worship 8:20-9:30
Blended worship 9:45-10:55
Contemporary worship 11:15-12:25
With small group sessions running during all 3 worship services

Because of the tightening of the new schedule, we realized that we need a way to keep us on time. Since our members entrust us with their time (specifically our volunteers in the preschool and children's areas), we need to honor their trust by starting and ending on time. If we, on a consistent basis, start and/or end late, we show them that we do not value them or the time they are giving us.

So, in order to help us accomplish this, I began the search for a countdown timer as you can see being used at conferences and things like that. I know ProPresenter has a built-in countdown, but we work on a PC and don't have the new ProPresenter for Windows yet, so I needed another option. I stumbled across this Countdown Clock from Outside The Box Ministries (I am in no way affiliated with them), and I have to say it's a pretty useful tool. It certainly has its limitations, but it also showed us that having a countdown is extremely useful for being on time. We have used it the past two weeks and have been right on time in every service. We set the clock so that it counts down to whatever time that is 10 minutes before the services end (9:20, 10:45, 12:15), and then we know the service needs to launch when the countdown says 60:00 left, and the pastor needs to moving into the invitation when the timer hits 00:00.

We launched our third service this past weekend (September 5th) and it was a huge success! We added about 100 new people to our small groups, with who knows how many more in worship. We are excited to see God doing some great things in our church!

One exciting opportunity about this schedule is that we have some people in our church who stay for all 3 services. They will attend worship in one slot, then go to their small group, and during the third slot they find somewhere to plug in and serve. An exciting thing for those of us who always need more help in our areas of ministry!

I'm not saying that this schedule is ideal or even viable for other churches, but it works great for us, and hopefully it might be a good starting point for some of you that are working your way down that path. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

[Paris MkVI]

It is always exciting to hear about church families finding ways to cope with problems that are good problems to have!

I find it fascinating that your small groups also meet Sunday mornings. What is a typical group size?

We have also been in the three-service mode in the past. It did require a greater effort on the pastoral staff to make sure the sermon was reduced in length but not reduced in value, while respecting scheduling. They really stepped up to the plate and delivered in that area.

There's an inexpensive application called Countdown Creator. Find it here:

http://www.thecountdowncreator.com/

Even if you have no editing capability - if you can make a background image in Photoshop or another tool, You can have simple, but effective custom countdowns every week.

If you do have editing capabilities, use this to make luma or alpha key countdown elements in any font style you want, quickly and easily. Then add them to your countdown edit elements and you are on your way!

[TongBlack]

Small group sizes vary. I believe our smallest group is about 6-8, while our largest is in the upper 30s. Typical groups are probably in the mid to upper teens. We have something like 20-30 small groups that meet on a given Sunday morning. We do also have youth (7th-12th grade) small groups that meet Sunday evenings at 5:30, as well as a couple of adult small groups that meet Sunday evenings.

I have stumbled across that software before, when I was searching for countdowns. I think the software you mentioned is really more for countdowns that would be displayed on the main screens (such as a 5-minute countdown before starting the service). We have tried using this type of countdown before, but found we just weren't crazy about it. We display the countdown that I mentioned previously on a 20" monitor sitting above the soundboard, so that it is really only visible to people onstage. Another nice feature of the software that we use is that we can insert a time we want the countdown to end, and it automatically calculates how much time is remaining.

[Chkurgrnd]

If you're doing the extended desktop thing with a notebook computer, you can go here and scoot it off to the side so you can project it on the main screen and confidence monitor too. Not sure if you would want it for both but something to play around with... Free, just need internet access... quick and cheap countdown, use it as you wish.

[jksbc]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It's great to hear stories of church growth. I'm surprised your third service was blended and not contemporary. What is the ratio of people attending each service. We have attempted two services. We are a non-denominational contemporary church so both are the same. We went back to one not because two wasn't successful but because we were able to expand our seating capacity to accommodate both crowds. Praise God we are now facing it again. We found that the majority of people still like to come to the later service. I'm just curious what you do to promote yours and how do you get a balance?

[TongBlack]

I must have miscommunicated, because our latest service (11:15) is our contemporary service.

It's difficult to give exact numbers, as we don't "take attendance" during worship, we have to just guess. And considering I'm the tech director, I typically am up in the balcony so don't even see most of the people sitting in the back (it is a baptist church, after all...) We've only done the 3 service schedule for one week now, and it was a holiday weekend (Labor Day), so our numbers were a bit skewed, but I would estimate that we have about 175-200 in worship at 8:20, and then about 400-450 in our 9:45 service, and between 350-450 in our 11:15 service (this one fluctuates the most). It's funny, because under our previous schedule, we were averaging 450-550 in our blended service, so we were expecting about 200-250 in each service, but obviously God decided to do something huge. Our pastor commented in staff meeting that after he walked up onto the stage in the 9:45, he thought that the service looked like it had just as many people before we added another worship service. God is definitely up to something great!

I'm guessing you mean you want to know what we do to promote our earlier services so that not everyone comes to the later. A couple of things mean that it's not really an issue for us:

1) My church has many age groups. We have recently been adding a lot of younger families, but we still have many medium, middle age and senior adults who are very faithful and on board with what our church is doing. Most of the older folks (and some of the younger as well) prefer the choir and orchestra style of worship, so for them it's a non-issue; they're going to come early so they can enjoy the music they want. These are also the people who are used to getting up early, so coming in at 8:20 is no big deal. Now, we don't have a lot of younger families (especially not those with children) that come to the 8:20, which makes sense. It's tough to get kids up and out of the house that early.

2) Because of the way our Sunday morning and small groups are set up, most people (aside from visitors) are also attending a small group Sunday morning. Under our old schedule, if you wanted to attend both a small group and worship, you had to be here from 8:30-12:00. That's a long Sunday for some people. Under our new schedule, if you want to go to worship and small group, there are basically two time frames you will be at church. Either 8:20-10:55, or 9:45-12:25. Now, obviously our 9:45 service is the highest attended service in our church, and we also have the highest attended small groups during that time. People do like to sleep in, but some people would rather be done by 10:55, even if it means getting up earlier.

To get people evenly split between the 8:20 and 9:45 services from the previous 8:30 service, it simply took some communication. We talked to the small group leaders who met during our previous 10:30 slot (which means these people were going to 8:30 worship and then 10:30 small group) and selectively split their small group times between the 8:20 and 9:45 slots, so that in whichever service they didn't have their small group, they would go to worship. Theoretically that would give us a pretty even balance in the 8:20 and 9:45 worship. What we didn't count on were A) the people who were previously in the contemporary service who would rather be in the 9:45 blended, and B) all the new people that we would get in the 9:45. This is why we had twice as many people in the 9:45 service our first Sunday.

Phew, that was a long post! Hopefully that answered your questions. Feel free to ask again if I didn't.

[jksbc]

Byron,
You answered my questions. Thank you.