Summer Road Trip - planning ahead to #WinSummer

Summer Road Trip 2018: #WinSummer

Road trip placard, perfect for photos with people! 

VBS kids in front of selfie backdrop

I’ve been a pastor around 24 years now, and one thing bothers me every year is the assumption and accompanying reality that because it is summer, worship attendance will drop. In the spring of 2018 I decided that I was also bothered that every summer I was bothered and decided to take action. My working question: what would happen if we planned ahead with a goal of keeping our weekly attendance the same, if not higher than during the school year?

Worship attendance matters in all congregations. We are organized to be communities that worship together, and fewer people in attendance means we are missing some of those who form the “together.” Worship is also the primary mode of weekly connection for those members in my church who are active; I suspect this is the case for any congregation that does not have a robust small group program. Finally, worship is the place that we are most likely to encounter first-time visitors to our church.  For these reasons and more, attendance trends are not just something we file away on data reports. Attendance is one way to measure the engagement of both our existing members and visitors.

Once we made the decision to not give up on summer, several questions had to be answered.

One service or two? When I arrived at South Gate, they had an established pattern of moving from their school-year 8:30am and 11am worship services to a single service at 9:30. My first summer, I observed that no one seemed real happy about the compromise time so I suggested staying with two services year round. After a few years, it seemed the later service had a noticeable dip in attendance, so for the 2018 summer we decided to attempt a single service, encouraging everyone to show up. After several thoughtful discussions, we decided to try a new time for a single summer service: 9am. I also offered to keep worship services to 45 minutes, which worked some but not all of the time.

Theme. I thought that a common overarching theme for the summer might help people stay engaged and create a pattern that would help people who were out of town catch back up when they returned. Another hope is that the theme would be recognizable and interactive so that people visiting or traveling would be able to connect. Summer Road Trip evolved as our theme, and was fleshed out by graphic designer Steve Raglin.

Design. Key pieces of design included a Road Trip banner for the church front lawn; signage indicating the summer worship time; bookmarks listing themes for each Sunday and special events, a screen print for t-shirts, and a selfie backdrop for photos.

Special Sundays. I feel like a special themed Sunday here are there, perhaps with an accompanying party, activity or creative outfit opportunity can energize people both to remember to show up and to invite others who might have an affinity for the theme. I’ll share in other posts about particular themed Sundays and how they are tied to scripture. In general, my strategy is to limit this type of themed Sunday to once a month; plan a solid scriptural tie-in; warn music staff far in advance so if they want to select on-theme music they have time to prepare; and make sure any invitations to dress for the event are accompanied by reassurances that doing so is optional and a reminder to think through how to be welcoming to people entering the building who do not realize it is a themed Sunday.

Our 2018 Summer Special Sundays were Unicorn Sunday in June, Superhero Sunday in July, and Aloha Sunday in August.

Results.

We found ourselves with a net increase of 3-4 people on a weekly basis, which represented a 4% increase on average over the previous year’s summer attendance. Summer Sunday School participation increased by… a gazillion percent. Total attendance the previous summer was perhaps 20 people. 2018 Sunday School attendance in just the first month was over 150, thanks to moving to an intermittent and all-ages format that included snacks and craft stations built around our themes.

The difficult part: We lost some people because of the move to a single service. A good number of our regular 11am attendees were not able to successfully move to the summer 9am time. Some chose another congregation with an 11am service and attended there during the summer, others did not attend as often as during the school year, while others made it to 9am worship but were not very awake and/or articulated a sense that it felt bad that they were being asked to make a 2-hour adjustment, while the early service folks only had to make a 30 minute adjustment. My guess is that we would have had a more significant increase in worship participation over the previous summer if we had offered two Sunday services, at the “usual” school year times.
SA
Sabbath Artist

Sabbath Artist

I knew it was time for a new blog, one dedicated to thinking about and documenting worship ideas. What I did not have was a name. I asked friends for help, and Sherry came through. “Sabbath Artist,” she wrote me. “SA. It’s also for your initials.”

I’ve had a long and fairly well-documented struggle with how I relate to the word artist. I enjoy artists. I appreciate the way they see the world as a story and then help interpret the stories they discover so that we can understand the stories more fully.

One of my neighbors is an artist. She communicates stories through rocks and stones that she coaxes into shapes and warms with metal to make jewelry that is both beautiful and filled with the stories the rocks told her and that are waiting to participate in the next story. We were talking one day about artists and stories, and I shared that I felt like I was an artist without an art form. She responded very quickly, insisting that I did have an art form: relationships. Another artist friend volunteered a few months later that he thought my art form was living life.

I asked myself if  “Sabbath Artist” was too bold a claim. What would happen if it turns out I’m not an artist at all? What kind of person self-proclaims that they are an artist? And yet – I think Sabbath at its best is art. Sabbath involves stories, contemplation, and practice; we learn to use new tools to better express our Sabbath stories.  I don’t think I have ever met an artist who felt they were done learning their craft; if anything the way of the artist is one where the path continues to change as new stories interact with longer-held stories and the artist stretches to continue to better share those new and old stories together.

I have not perfected Sabbath, nor have I perfected the planning of worship. I do think that becoming more intentional about the stories that inform both Sabbath and worship will help me live in to the art form. And perhaps I will discover some new art forms, new ways to share stories, along the way.

South Gate UMC, Lincoln - January 2019