I think the church should be open 24/7 - 365 days a year. This comes from my beliefs on worship, prayer, and etc. Resisting urge to ........ (Got my heart pumping!)

Bravo...Bravo....
I am excited by this concept.
I would love to be involved in something like this.

I wonder if perhaps the main message is recorded such as it is at some multisite churches like Fellowship, or if each of those pastors listed for each day speak?  I guess those guys might just oversee each day’s service and there is a separate team for greeting, worship, etc. for each day. 

Either way, it is a really neat idea!

Justin,

I poked around on their website a bit, and my understanding is that all services for the week get the same message, either live or by video (so that the teaching pastor doesn’t have to teach all week long.) But the host pastor for each night sets the tone or style for that service.  They are asking 600 of their members to commit to a specific night service each week for the first year in order to make more room on Sunday mornings.

I’m the administrative pastor at the church that is doing 7 Nights of Worship.  Thanks to a Google Alert I found this discussion.  I hope I can answer a few questions and clarify a few things.

We prayed and planned for 2 years.  Let me give a brief sketch here of how we are doing this and direct you to my blog for more info…

Background:

We had 4 services Sunday morning on the campus doing 7 nights of worship today.  We also already had a Saturday evening service.  The auditorium does seat 500 with 100 additional in a spillover room with a movable wall.  A year ago we started Wednesday and Friday nights.  In January we started Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  We transitioned Thursday from Youth only to Youth and adults.

How we implemented:

<ul><li>First, we re-defined success.  50 people is great!
</li><li>We built separate teams for each night.  These teams of servant-leaders are overseeing first impressions, Tech, Greeters, Children, Prayer and Worship on their night.
</li><li>A nursery is provided every night with 2 paid workers, but 3 nights currently feature a children’s program through elementary.
</li><li>Thursday night featuers a separate teaching time for students
</li><li>We identified godly men to be host pastors and we increased our lay pastor team (deacons) to help on each night.  Deacons are committed to a single night.
</li><li>One of our staff pastors at least attends just about every night.
</li><li>All elements of the service are live, except the message.  We generally do a video playback of the message delivered by our teach pastors the prior weekend.  Saturday is a live service starting the week of worship.  We do sometimes feature live teaching on the other nights.
</li><li>We use black curtains and a different screen configuration along with table and chairs to create a coffee house atmosphere making the auditorium more intimate.  The space feels full with 50 people, but can be quickly adjusted up.  Some nights have 200 in attendance.
</li></ul>
In closing

We felt led by God to do this to give people more options and times to worship and to continue creating capacity to reach our community.  We simply cannot afford to relocate and build a bigger building.  We are working toward a multi-site ministry model and we do have a campus in a neighboring city.  The teams on our nights are also a place where we can develop leaders for future campus starts.
We are committed to making this work, but we are constantly re-assessing our progress.  We have grown our support staff significantly to help in this effort, but our reliance upon servant leaders in our church has helped tremendously.

I hope we are able to add a few more staf members and more teaching pastors so we can do more live teaching on the nights, but we find video is working well.

We’ve invested into our facilities in a major way to make this happen.  However, we started 6 congregations inside our existing facilities for the same cost of starting one campus.

Visit http://www.cmsconsulting.org and search on “7 nights of worship” for prior posts on this topic.

May God guide you in your ministry as he has us in ours.

Kevin McCord

http://www.7nightsofworship.com

Is the theme song 8 days a week?  This is an awesome Idea, thanks for having the patience and courage to hear God’s plan for your local church.  May your tribe increase.

That’s a very good point Peter.  It is one our pastoral team spends a lot of time considering.  Only time will truly tell if we can do this in a sustainable fashion.  We’ll know much more in a year’s time, but even then we’ll need 5 years to get this established.

In part these nights of worship are separate congregations.  They manage their own needs like a new church plant.  In part we monitor and assist with their needs.  In theory (as you point out) they have the best of both worlds.

We did hire an evening tech person as well as evening houskeeping and evening child-care.  These staff people compliment the volunteer teams.  We hope to hire an evening receptionist who will staff our small bookstore and answer phones. 

It doesn’t take that much to put on a 50 person event.  Many churches have events throughout the week and churches with schools are even more committed to events throughout week days.  We don’t have that reality.

There are three people currently doing more than we want them to do.  The Tech Director, The Worship Director, and the Facilities Director.  While we have hired assistants for each they can only transfer so much knowledge.

I do want to agree, without any sarcasm, with your comment.  We aren’t ready to applaud anything yet either.  After two years of planning we found that most of our immediate concerns were fairly easy to address operationally by rethinking our expectations and releasing some of our resources and creativity.

The real challenge is to find and enjoy the opportunities that come from having smaller, more intimate worship gatherings.  I can’t wait to see these congregations within our church begin to form an identity and develop some of their own ministry.  We are hoping to strke a balance between a single, united church and allowing each Night of Worship to express its own personality and style.

On a final note we rely heavily on part time ministers and interns as well.  The intern program is new and growing, but we are putting a lot of energy behind it.  We’re starting a school for the arts to help us develop internal talent.  We also have a team concept for our ministries.  As an example, a church our size would probably have a full time children’s pastor or director.  We have three part-time children’s ministry team members one of whom is the director.  This model is applied in youth and worship as well.  3 people puting in 75 hours can cover a lot of our needs and do so in a way that one person putting in 50 hours could not.

Forgive me for writing so much.  That’s partly just my personality and partly a reflection of how much time and thought we’ve invested into doing this thing God put on our hearts.

Sincerely,

Kevin McCord

Administrative Pastor

Church of Pembroke Pines

Nora, to address your concern of staff and lay leaders being exhausted.........as Facilities Director of the “7 Nights of Worship” church, I can tell you that we are so excited about what is happening at our church.  The feeling my team and I have is shear JOY!  It’s understandable that there would be concern about the serving members, but we are fueled by this concept and the possibilities of the outcome.

It’s electrifying to be part of such an innovative endeavor!

Gabi

I am a revivalist and this sounds to me like revival! But it also demonstrates the need and the willingness of a church to raise up future preachers and teachers of the Gospel! If we do not allow others with a teaching and preaching gift to help carry the load, with all the multi site venues springing up, in a few years there will only be “50” pastors (more or less) in all of America!

I don’t think that’s what God really wanted when he moved Paul to write about the five-fold ministry in Ephesians. But this model will raise up future pastors, teachers, etc…

How evangelistically effective will this be?  Will members just choose their service of convenience?

hmm clubs 3 nites a week

Hi everyone!  This is such a great confirmation of what the Lord has placed in my wife’s heart and myself as Pastor of the Hillcrest Family Life Baptist Church and center here in the Philippines. Acts 2:47 says, “...and the Lord added to the Church DAILY such as should be saved.” Let us open the opportunity for the Lord to work in the hearts of people everyday thru the Church:seven days a week.
We are CHURCH:  SEVEN DAYS A WEEK.
Open from 9:00am to 9:00pm everyday.  The first worship service was on April 13, 2008.  For 10 months, God has been faithful.  Please check out our multiply site.  http://www.familylifecenter.multiply.com
GOD BLESS YOU!