Oncers, Noncers, and Evening Worship

Keeping Kids Christian was released on February 24th! You can find the book for over 30% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com and Westminster Books and 60%! off at Reformation Heritage Books. You can also find it at Amazon and Christianbook.com at 15% off, as well as at Barnes & Noble.

I’ve been able to do a number of interviews, and the first one to be published is at Unscripted Faith, part of the Cornerstone Television Network.

A friend of mine grew up in farm-country Indiana, and their family faithfully attended church twice on Sundays. She likes to tell us that the only times as kids they were allowed to skip the Sunday evening service was when Elvis and then the Beatles performed on the ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. The evening service was once a regular feature of American Protestant worship, but for a variety of reasons has slowly disappeared. I believe that an evening service is incredibly valuable for Christian spiritual formation; for that reason we instituted an evening service in my congregation two years ago.

But I couldn’t help but think of my friend’s story when I was recently introduced to a phrase from the Dutch Reformed tradition: “Oncers become noncers”. The Reformed Journal ran a series on evening worship services using this phrase as a touch-point. Its logic is simple — if you stop attending the evening service and only attend the morning service, inevitably you’ll become a non-attender. The series critiqued that logic (some start off as oncers and become twicers; others were twicers who became oncers but still faithfully attend) while affirming the value of the evening service. So is the phrase right? Are its critiques fair?

One of the central arguments I make in Keeping Kids Christian, borrowed from the research of Christian Smith and Amy Adamzyck, is that parental faith cannot be an identity accessory, but must be an organic, all-of-life community formation project that manifests in regular, sincere participation in the life of the church. Church needs to be something that shapes your life, not simply a place you go every-so-often. In that sense “oncers becomes noncers” is accurate: if you downgrade the time you and your family spend at a church, by definition you’re downgrading the formative power of the church in your life. However, going from two services a Sunday to one isn’t the same thing as downgrading church and faith from a community formation project to identity accessory. Becoming a oncer from a twicer is a shift in quantity (and probably quality; generally speaking when it comes to worship quantity is quality), not a change in kind. In that sense the criticisms that oncers become noncers is fair.

However, going from twicer to oncer is setting yourself and your family to swim against the current. When the worship of God is understood as the spiritually formative purpose of the Lord’s Day it shapes the way you think about the rest of your time. Taking a break from worship (going from twicer to oncer) or prioritizing other activities over worship (the NFL, homework, meal prep, golf) undercuts faith formation and fuels seeing faith as an accessory to your life on par with these other activities. To put a fine point on it: if you want your kids to stay Christian, then an evening worship in addition to a morning one is all benefit, no drawback. Being a oncer won’t weaken your faith or your kid’s faith, but the goal isn’t to not-weaken faith, but to strengthen it. The more faith and the life of the church organically forms you and your faith, the more it will shape the faith of your kids. The evening worship is one of the best gifts to accomplish this.