Long Worship Service

This morning our worship service ran too long.  The director of our upcoming mission trip planned the service, and it would have been fine, except there were several people involved in presenting different things, and some of us, myself included, spoke longer than the few minutes we intended.  Anyway, the end result was the service was two hours long - forty-five minutes longer than normal.

I never used to pay attention to such things, but to keep the peace I've maintained a sort of unspoken social contract with the congregation.  I generally plan our gatherings so they will last about 75 minutes, and I'm pretty diligent about keeping it from ever exceeding 90 minutes.  Today was a rare exception, but I've already heard there were some pretty disgruntled people after the gathering.

Foreign missionaries often have this problem.  They are not accustomed to the hard scheduled time constraints we employ here in the states.  People here can get downright nasty if you allow your worship service to run beyond what they expect.  Of course, this morning's gathering didn't really need to run as long as it did.  Had I known it was going to, I certainly would have abbreviated my own contributions to the morning.  But it bothers me that this is such a big deal.

American Christians are very much accustomed to rigid limitations on the time and effort they are expected to expend on worship or ministry.  If you exceed these expectations, you often hear about it.  An hour and fifteen minutes seems to be about the limit for an organized worship gathering.  Ten hours a month devoted to a ministry and people start talking about "burnout."  Of course, we have lots of rationalizations for all of this.  We are busy people, with important things to do.

There is something about it, though, that eats at me...that makes me question our devotion.  I know that a worship service or hours spent in service of a particular ministry are not necessarily indications of our faithfulness, but it's also hard to believe we are really surrendered to Jesus if two hours of worship or two hours of ministry in a given week are enough to deplete us.

I've been feeling regret today for letting the service run so long, but I also regret that I'm conditioned to think it's a problem.