After prayerful consideration, the leadership of the church has decided to take a break from the Saturday evening worship service indefinitely. We WILL have service this Saturday (11/28) and the next (12/5), but after that we will not have worship on Saturday nights. (Our 10am Sunday morning service will continue as normal.)

While our church as a whole continues to grow, the Saturday night service has been declining in attendance for some time now. We believe there are several reasons for this. Some within our control and some not. The honest answer is I believe I made some mistakes when we originally launched this service last May. They say hind-sight is 20/20 and this has definitely been a learning experience for me. Some of the mistakes I believe I made are:

• I rushed into the launch of this service too quickly. More time should have been invested into researching the best way to launch, casting the vision, and church-wide prayer.
• We launched the service at a bad time of the year — right before summer. Any momentum we had in late spring was lost during the summer.
• I was overly optimistic that we could get the word out effectively through word-of-mouth. I see now that we really needed to invest some funds into more effective advertising methods to properly insure that our community knew this service existed.

After conversations with many of you, I believe that we pretty much agree on a couple of things. First, no one dislikes the Saturday worship service. Second, there’s no reason why a Saturday night worship service shouldn’t work in Dixon. We still believe this is something that can be effective in reaching people in Dixon. So what we have decided to do is to shelve the Saturday night service for now and re-launch it at a later date. We will learn from the mistakes we made this first try, and re-launch it when we believe we can do it right. We don’t know when this will be, but we won’t rush into it until we believe we can do it properly. In short, we’re not giving up on Saturday nights, just re-grouping.

One thing I want to encourage you to consider is that as a church we have a vision for reaching this community. We will constantly make plans to help make that vision reality. Some plans will succeed and some not so much. Plans might change, but the vision never does. Every mentor I’ve talked to has told me the same thing–if you’re not occasionally failing, you’re not trying hard enough. We have to have the guts to try new things. The bottom line is we learned some valuable lessons that will help us in our future plans.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who stepped up and invested time, energy, and prayer to make this service possible. Your service and sacrifices did not go unnoticed. It’s an honor to serve our King alongside of you!

Go With God!!!

Pastor Jeff Myers