N I THE SONG SERMON O one will deny that variety adds interest and that routine dissipates it. That is a common place so bald that the average preacher would resent it as an insult to his intelligence to dwell on it. Yet that same minister will have two church services every Sunday in the year as exactly alike as two peas in a pod, and will then complain that not only outsiders, but his own people as well, fail to attend both. In some churches the morning service is largely attended, while the evening service attracts but a few. In other communities the evening service is the centre of interest. Does not the very statement of the facts suggest that these communities will only support properly a single service such as we call regular, and is it not easy to take the next step and infer-not, as we practically do in summer-time in our cities, that a second service is unnecessary-but that the second service should be different in method and character? I look in vain through my Bible to find any rule, Jewish or Christian, making two exactly similar services every Sunday obligatory. Our church disciplines contain no law requiring them. And yet probably a hundred thousand preachers in this land lay upon themselves the burden of preparing two sermons each week, when one probably would be amply sufficient. Just think of a hundred thousand useless sermons every Sunday! Take the time and energy they represent, and put half of them into the improvement and strengthening of the other hundred thousand sermons. If the other half of this wasted energy were put into additional pastoral work, into church management, into the fuller control and development of the working forces of the congregation, what an improvement there would be in their life and work! I really think that many churches would be better off if they had but one church service every Sunday. But there is a better way: instead of reproducing the staid morning service with its program as fixed as if it were a ritual sanctified by age and tradition, let the evening service have a wide liberty, taking many forms and employing many methods, but emphasizing chiefly evangelistic work among the unsaved. Little by little, many of our churches have confined all their hopes and efforts for the salvation of the unsaved to their Sunday-school scholars. Not long ago I heard a minister say publicly, that it was impossible to get any conversions outside of the Sunday-school, and he deprecated any efforts to secure the attendance of adults at a revival service that was contemplated. In a sense he was right, for at his evening services he had an empty house, no efforts having been made to attract the unsaved people of the community. The aggressive, versatile, musical pastor has no difficulty in filling his evening services with unconverted people. He baits his hook for them, and they come in throngs. It is no particular miracle that his church grows by leaps and bounds, for when his revival meetings begin it is easy fishing in that crowded evening service. The Sunday-school and the evening congrega |