Pineridge Blog

At the regular Session meeting May 15, session accepted the recommendation of the Worship and Education task group: beginning in August to move the contemporary worship service to Sunday at 9:30 a.m. to overlap with Sunday School and to add an 11:00 a.m. Sunday service. The final Saturday evening service will be June 30.

Mike Ahrendt and Suzy Proctor have done great work leading the task group focusing on worship and education. The report of their work will be in the June newsletter which gives more detail of their many discussions around Worship and Education across the congregation over the past couple of months. What they have discovered is that while people have enjoyed being together in one service on Sundays, there is a desire to offer two unique worship experiences, one Contemporary and one Traditional. While there have been good things about worshipping on Saturday night offering a service at that time has never been as appealing as was originally hoped.

While we will be again offering two services on Sundays, we are not just “going back to the way things were.”  There were good reasons we made the change almost two years ago and good reasons we are making the changes now. The primary reason for the change now is children. Since we changed the schedule our children’s Sunday School is half as large as it was then. What we are currently doing is not working for young families. But we also realize that we need to be more intentional about making what we do on Sunday a true family worship experience, which includes children more in participation and even leadership. We also realize that we need to do more to develop a larger pool of volunteers in Christian Education to support a Sunday School program which overlaps with worship.

I want to thank Mike and Suzy and the members of their team for all of their hard work. I want to thank the Session for working hard to make the best decision for the church. And I want to thank the congregation for patience and flexibility as we try new things, learn and adjust.