The Sunday Dynamic
Lately I have been engaged in conversation about church and Sundays. In our church, we have had some conversations about the difficulty of being at church on Sundays due to so many other obligations on Sundays. In response to these conversations and the reality of competing obligations on Sundays, we have moved our educational ministries to Wednesdays.
I actually thought it was just our church having that conversation. Recently, however, I discovered that a number of churches in our denomination across the country were having the same conversation and moving ministries that were traditionally taking place on Sundays to other days of the week. Locally, our pastors here in the La Grange area started discussing this dynamic as well.
I am old enough to remember the Texas blue laws that were in effect when I grew up in Corpus Christi. Under those laws, most businesses were forced to close on Sundays in deference to the life of the church. Restaurants could open, as I remember the Luby’s cafeteria being the only business open in the Padre Staples mall in Corpus on Sundays and us kids having free run of the entire mall after Sunday lunch. Even HEB was closed on Sundays. I played baseball in high school and we had a tournament in Corpus Christi with teams from the Valley, San Antonio, and Austin. The tournament was running long with our championship game starting at 9:30 on Saturday night. On everyone’s mind was the question of whether we were going to finish our game before the lights went off at midnight because high school sports were forbidden to play on Sunday. We finished our game at 11:45 p.m. (And we won, by the way.)
The social contract between society and the communities of faith, however, was changing, and by the early 1980s, the blue laws were lifted and other businesses could open on Sundays. This allowed businesses to make a little more money and it allowed consumers more options in spending their money. I remember a lot of people stating that it shouldn’t be affecting the church at all.
But here we are, some forty something years later, and the church is having to make some major adjustments as the Sunday dynamic in our society has changed. The social contract has changed. Sunday is no longer the day of the week in which the church enjoys society’s favor but rather it is treated as equals with places of business and the kids’ soccer tournament.
Rather than bemoaning the change and challenge wrought upon the church by the changing nature of what Sunday means for our society, I am actually in favor of the church not having such favored status, of having Sunday protected by our society. It is not because I can now buy shoes on Sundays but because it feels like the church became too dependent on being protected by society. We, in our communities of faith, became too complacent in our ministries, counting on the community at large to prop us up with a special status. It allowed the church to be able to operate unchecked in many ways, to not have to compete for the hearts, souls, and minds of people. That can make us complacent and lazy.
In the first few centuries of the Christian church, it could be a question of life or death to be part of a church. You had to fight the culture in order to be a Christian, you had to be quite intentional about your faith. Maybe now we can recover some of that intentionality about being followers of Jesus Christ since we can no longer count on the culture to do it for us. I like that. I want people in my church to be people who want to be there, who are making a statement by being there, knowing that they are making a decision to be in church rather than somewhere else.
What do you think?