I love being the pastor of a church where overcrowding is an issue.  I love that our Children's ministry is outgrowing Lakeview Hall and will have to double the number of KidStuf times.  I love that our Student ministry has outgrown the Fallout for worship on Wednesday nights and will be using the Great Hall for their worship.  Aren't these great problems?

 

Overcrowding is also an issue in our sanctuary and parking lot. If you have attended either our 9:45 or 11:15 Sunday services (outside of the summer), you are undoubtedly aware of the difficulty we've had in transitioning between those services.  The process of emptying the sanctuary, retrieving children, exiting the parking lot, and then the later crowd parking, dropping off children, and getting settled in the sanctuary has not gone smoothly.  A half hour between the two services is simply not enough. 

 

How can we help? Well, we can't build a new sanctuary or enlarge the parking lot, but we can provide more time and more help for folks to park, enter, worship and leave, before the next congregation comes to park, enter and worship.

 

So we have two solutions.

 

First, we will have parking helper/greeters serving in the parking lot starting in September.  We tested the parking help this summer for a few weeks, and learned a few things.  (While it went pretty well overall, I was disappointed to learn that a very few of our members were actually rude to these servants.  It's unthinkable that a Christian could act in such an ungodly way.  I hope we won't see any more of that. ) The parking helper/greeters will be a big help between the 2nd and 3rd services in assisting members and guests to exit and to find good parking places.

 

Second, we experimented this summer with moving the 9:45 service to 9:30, keeping the later service at 11:15, which provided 45 minutes of transition time instead of 30.  This worked great in lots of ways.  It took the time pressure off the 9:30 service, so an extra five minutes was not disastrous.  It gave people more time to connect-talk with one another, welcome our guests, and meet new people-which is one of our goals for Sunday morning.  It made parking much easier.  In short, it was a huge success in every way.

 

Unfortunately, in order to move the middle service to 9:30, the early service will have to meet at 8:00 AM, fifteen minutes earlier than previously.  I honestly hate the thought of asking the early service attendees, most of whom have been so faithful for so long, to get up and come out 15 minutes earlier.  (I'm not real excited about getting there earlier myself.)  The Session tried to find ways to avoid moving the 8:15 service to 8:00, but in the end we could come up with no workable alternative. 

 

We also found that the Friday evening service was appreciated by a significant group this summer, so we are likely to bring that back next summer.

 

As the Promise choir returns from its summer break and our new Coro del Lago choir continues to grow, the diverse worship styles at our Sunday services will continue to be as we have enjoyed them for years.

 

So the worship schedule beginning September 12 will be:

 

Sunday   8:00 AM Traditional organ music, occasional choir, & weekly communion
             9:30 AM  Blended worship, usually with choir
             11:15 AM Contemporary worship

 

With apologies and gratitude to the saints at our early service, I believe we can look forward to an outstanding year of worship at Bay Presbyterian.

 

Blessings,
Garnett