Children's Church

Scott Clark has an excellent post here on the subject of children's church. Many years ago, I remember attending a church and being looked at as if I was calling on people to worship Satan because we weren't going to put our child in children's church that morning. Now one thing that we have to keep in mind is that it's important that we train our children how to sit in worship. Nothing wrong with a little noise, but constantly noisy children should be taken out of worship so as not to distract everyone else. In fact, I'd be curious to hear any advice that some of you parents have for training and teaching our covenant children to sit through worship.

Whatever Happened to the Second Service?

One of the things that is interesting about the ecclesiastical landscape today is the almost universal absence of a Sunday evening service. Whenever we are on vacation, or out of town for some reason, it is virtually impossible to find a church that has a second service. Now certainly, there are many reasons for this. If you don't see Sunday as the Lord's Day, a day of rest and worship, then you might as well get worship out of the way in the morning (or even Saturday night) so that you can have the rest of the day free to do what you want. But why is it that among so-called "Reformed" churches that the second service has disappeared. Or, if there is a second service, why is attendance so poor? I am thankful that we get anywhere from 75-85% of our people back for the evening service, but in talking with fellow ministers, I've discovered that most Reformed churches (even of the confessional stripe) typically get 20-30% of their people back for the evening service. Some get 40%, but very, very few get more than 50%. Here's the question: Is there a biblical warrant for a second service? Or is that just simply a tradition that has no biblical foundation? I hope to use a post or two to look at this issue, so that we will understand both "why" we have a second service and the importance of the second service.