My blogging friends know that the posting date/time stamp may not be the actual time of writing! I confess–I am writing this on Saturday, but setting it to post on Sunday morning.
The spring time change! Spring forward! I call it the “bad” time change!
It is the “bad” time change because people refuse to get ready for what they know is coming. When our boys were growing up, Jan and I set the clocks forward early so that the time change occurred in our house on on Friday evening and Saturday morning. The boys got up on Saturday morning with the time change already done. Saturday was a shorter day (but not noticeably shorter). Despite all that has been written about how the time change is challenging because of body rhythms, our boys never seemed to notice. Sunday dawned fresh and new–with our family ready to worship God. This procedure may or may not work for you and your family, but I can tell you what won’t work.
What won’t work is to spend Saturday as normal, even stay up a little later than normal, and suddenly at bedtime remember that the clock has to go forward an hour. While some things are not easy to prepare for, I can guarantee you that total lack of preparation is almost certain to fail.
It is the “bad” time change because the church has forgotten that it has the responsibility of telling people what time it is. During our ministry at one church, the typical Sunday morning schedule was reversed–worship first, Bible classes second. [Not the subject of this writing, but if you’ve never experienced the freshness of fellowship and worship assemblies before Bible classes, you have no idea how it feels, what it does for the heart, how much calmer the kids are…..the list of positive observations is long!] With the worship assembly first, it was easier to manage scheduling. On several occasions during the year, the church shared worship without Bible classes following. We didn’t have Bible classes when we had guest speakers who were likely to preach longer than normal. We didn’t have Bible classes when we shared “special focus” worship times, for example, focusing on missions. And, we didn’t have Bible classes on the “bad” time change.
The instructions to the church members were to “come on the old time” and “leave on the new time”. We worshiped on the old schedule, and at the end of worship, set our clocks forward together. I usually preached on something related to “time.” Is it not the job of the church to let people know what time it is? In a previous time when churches had bells, wasn’t the reason to remind people of the time? Perhaps the church needs to rethink its responsibility to constantly tell people what time it is!