The Sudden Death of the Evening Service
“Across the ages, the number of those who found eternal life in the Lord’s Day evening worship of the Christian church must be very large.”
I’m well aware that the opinions I have shared in these short essays can be easily dismissed as the sort of “back in my day” resentments typical of curmudgeons in their old age. But then, the present is by no means always an improvement on the past, however comfortable people may have become with modern ways; and in a revolutionary culture such as ours, now hostile as it is to Christian practice, this is particularly and obviously so.
So at least listen to me when I say that Christians are softer now than they were a generation ago, they do less than Christians once did, and they seem more inclined to take an easier path in their practice of their faith. I’m not thinking so much about the fact that they don’t spend the time memorizing Holy Scripture that Christians used to, or that fewer of them are active in some program of Christian evangelistic witness. I’m thinking particularly of the sudden death of the evening service.
The liturgy of the Temple had both morning and evening sacrifices on the Sabbath Day. Psalm 92 is explicitly a psalm for the Sabbath Day and mentions the people’s praise both morning and evening. Most of the worship services mentioned in the New Testament were held in the evening. Indeed, what might be called the first Sunday “service” of the new epoch took place at night, when the Lord met his disciples gathered in a room in Jerusalem on Easter evening. As the fact that he met with his disciples on the first day of the week has always been regarded as paradigmatic, so has the fact that he met with them in the evening of that first Christian Sunday.
When I came to our presbytery in 1978, every church had two services on the Lord Day, one in the morning and one in the evening, each with its own sermon. That Lord’s Day schedule was hardly an innovation. It had been, more or less, the custom of centuries. The evidence for two services on the Lord’s Day throughout Christian history is legion. I don’t claim that it was the universal practice through the ages in every church or tradition. But it was certainly commonplace.
“Surely we should have a very good reason why we should abandon the practice of the Christian centuries to be in God’s house, to sing his praise and hear his Word, twice on the Lord’s holy Day.”
One of the most beautiful of the patristic hymns, “Hail Gladdening Light” (written in the third century or earlier!), is a hymn for the beginning of evening worship. The monastic hours included Vespers and Compline, both in the evening, and Vespers would in time become the Anglican Sunday evening service. Some of the most beautiful hymns of the Protestant tradition were hymns written for use in that evening service. It is painful to contemplate generations of Christians growing up without learning to sing “All Praise to Thee My God this Night,” “Abide with Me, Fast Falls the Eventide,” “Sun of My Soul Thou Savior Dear,” and “The Day You Gave Us, Lord, Is Ended.”
The tradition of evening worship became a staple of Protestant Christianity and certainly of Reformed Christianity. There was a second Sunday service in Calvin’s Geneva. The pilgrims in New England instituted both a forenoon and afternoon service on the Lord’s Day. The immense library of Charles Spurgeon’s published sermons contains two for each Lord’s Day. Many of the Presbyterian pastor Alexander Whyte’s superb books—for example, his celebrated four volumes of Bunyan Characters—originated as series of Lord’s Day evening sermons. The same would be true for the published work of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It was his practice to make the evening service more explicitly evangelistic. Across the ages, the number of those who found eternal life in the Lord’s Day evening worship of the Christian church must be very large.
But virtually overnight the evening service disappeared: a development remarkable not only for the speed with which it occurred, but because it happened virtually without comment, without explanation, and without objection. Obviously, the ministers did not strenuously object. One gets rather the impression that they led the way in reducing the number of services they would have to officiate and the sermons they would have to prepare. The congregations themselves quickly adjusted to spending only a few hours in a Lord’s Day morning at church and having the remainder of the day to themselves. For a great many evangelical believers, their participation in the corporate life of the church has been reduced to an hour and a half or less each week.
It is hardly difficult to make a case for the Lord’s Day evening service. For example, such a service provides another opportunity for ministers to preach and teach the Word of God. All the more in our day, when the church is not as biblically literate as it once was, reducing the number of times Christians hear the Word read and taught is hardly a recipe for spiritual renewal. I give my own testimony as a preacher that, were it not for the evening service—a well-attended evening service for which I was very grateful—there are many parts of the Bible my congregation would never have heard taught and many biblical themes that would never have been taught so comprehensively had I been limited to a single sermon each week. But with the evening service I was able to preach through almost all of the Bible and much of it twice.
“The special character of evening hymns bears witness to the particular set of holy thoughts that crowd the soul in the evening hours.”
The evening service provides important support for the sanctification of the Lord’s Day. Christians universally find it much easier to keep the Lord’s Day holy and make proper use of its time if the hours following the morning worship are an interval between two services. Then there is a limited amount of time in the middle of the day to put to proper use before it is time to return to church. That liturgical structure to the day lends itself to obedience and to a wise use of the day. The middle of the day can be filled with hospitality or ministry. In those churches where the Christian family is home from church at 11:00 a.m. or 1:00 p.m., with the remainder of the day stretching before them without occasion to return to church, the sanctification of the day is provided no support and now depends entirely on the determined exercise of the will. We have found that this is a recipe for disaster so far as the holiness of the Sabbath is concerned. But, if keeping the Sabbath holy is one of the great engines of Christian faith, holiness, and joy, as the Bible says it is, then the loss of the Sabbath in the evangelical church is no small thing.
Furthermore, there is a character to the evening that lends a particular quality to worship. Generations of Christians have known this from hallowed experience. The English poet Meredith’s line, “the largeness of the evening earth,” prompted G.K. Chesterton to comment: “The sensation that the cosmos has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening.” The special character of evening hymns bears witness to the particular set of holy thoughts that crowd the soul in the evening hours.
God’s people through the ages have prized the second service. Christian children growing up with Sunday evenings at church remember them with a special fondness. Most Christians, I suppose, have the memory of a special spiritual atmosphere attached to evening worship. We are, after all, talking about only another hour or hour and a half out of the entire week. Surely we should have a very good reason why we should abandon the practice of the Christian centuries to be in God’s house, to sing his praise and hear his Word, twice on the Lord’s holy Day. A day devoted to his worship and to the refreshment of our souls in him is surely very naturally a day that begins and ends in God’s house, among God’s people, with his Word in our ears and his praise in our hearts.
