We recently began a new Saturday evening service at Sun Valley Community Church. We were previously doing one 5:00pm service on Saturdays and the new service times are 4:30pm and 6:00pm. Here are a couple of the strategic thoughts behind the shift…
- Doing two back to back services allows people to come to church one hour and serve one hour. Previously there were people serving in ministry at our 5:00pm service and if they wanted to attend a worship service they actually had to come back on Sunday. That needed to be solved.
- Doing away with the 5:00pm service time and adding two new service times at 4:30pm and 6:00pm forced everyone on Saturdays to pick a new service time to attend. Otherwise if we had kept the 5:00pm service and simply added another service time, getting people to shift from what they were comfortable with would have been much less effective.
- Saturday has been our fastest growing service time year over year. In fact this past weekend we were up 36% (year over year).
- We communicated the change every weekend in the month of July, which led up to the launch of the new service times at the beginning of August. This gave us a couple of weeks to settle into 2 Saturday services before school kicked back in and the crowds were up.
- For weeks we said, “All of the smart people go to church on Saturdays.” In fact that’s when my family attends. It’s easier to navigate the parking lots, getting the kids in and out of Children’s Ministry, and we don’t have to rush or fight to get the kids ready on Sundays
- The video above is one of the creative methods we’ve used to communicate and encourage people to move to Saturdays.
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