Beginning Sunday, February 7th, we will be changing our service format at both the morning service and the Trash Bar service. We’re turning things around. We’ll no longer be starting with 30 minutes of worship, followed by coffee break, announcements, sermon, prayer ministry and closing. Instead we’ll start with one song, have some brief announcements, then the sermon, and finish up with worship and prayer ministry. There will be no change in our starting and ending time.

Why are we doing this? For serveral reasons. The biggest being that we’ve observed that on most Sundays most of us are not ready to dive into worship. So there’s a lot of just sitting and observing, especially for the people that are new  and don’t understand worship. As a result many of you have been showing up later and later in time for the main event – the sermon. In many cases, the best, and most meaningful times of worship have been at the end of the service, after we’ve been encouraged by God’s Word and have been given good reason to sing and express things like gratitude towards the Lord.

We didn’t come to this decision overnight.  For months now we’ve discussed this among our leaders and at our Core meetings and it’s been suggested that putting worship near the end of our service, while we offer prayer ministry made a lot of sense. We also checked with other Vineyard churches that have gone to this type of format and they’ve reported been getting very good results. So we’re making the change.

How will this effect you? It wil take some time getting used to but I think it will bring a better flow to our gatherings as well as make our services more “outsider friendly”.  It will also break the bad habit of lateness. With this new format if you show up late you’ll miss the sermon.  Some of you will have to make some healthy adjustments which won’t be so bad.

We’ll give it a four month trial run and then evaluate how things are going in May.