Sunday, July 16, 2006

The "Express" Service

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Our church (like many churches) has two services on Sunday mornings with Sunday School sandwiched in between.  The "late" service at 10:30 is the "normal" service and typically goes like this...

  1. Prelude
  2. Greetings
  3. Song, Hymns and Spiritual Songs
  4. Pastoral Prayer / Offering
  5. Special Music
  6. Sermon
  7. Closing Prayer

The service lasts about 75 minutes.  All services don't go in that exact order and occasionally there is a comic / topical skit thrown in, but for the most part that is what happens.  The "early" service lasts about 45 minutes so it is sometimes dubbed the "express" service.  The Prelude is axed along with Special Music.  The 3) Songs is cut down to about two hymns and verse three is usually skipped as well cutting that section down further.  However, the essential part 6) Sermon is left in its entirety.

Since we had a birthday party to prepare for today, we decided to go to the "express" service and then attend Sunday School.  That put us home at around 10:45 giving us a few hours to get ready for the party.

As I sat in the service this morning I got to thinking (no offense pastor!).  What if other parts of our life could be condensed in this manner?  Can you imagine your job being done in roughly sixty per cent of the normal time?  I mean, surely there are some non essential parts of your job that could be omitted.  You could work an eight hour shift in just under five hours.  If we applied this to TV, we could watch a half hour sit-com in eighteen minutes (even less if we could skip the commercials!).  How about sleep?  If I could cut that down by 40 per cent that would save me about two to three hours of my day.

Think of all the extra blog entries I could write!

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

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