Advertising - one church runs a newspaper ad that mentions that it will be a joint service held at their location at 10:30 am during the month of ------,   The other church runs their usual ad.

 

Bulletin - do you mention that it is a joint service St. Sebastian and Duke Street United?  Or that 'Welcome to Duke ---- who are joining us for the month of July?

Or just use your regular bulletin heading with your Church name, minister, time of service, etc.  

 

Do you have greeters and/or ushers to welcome people and show them a seat, or do you continue your custom of having people enter, pick up a bulletin from a table, and find their own seat?

 

Do you mention the visiting congregation at any point during the service? 

 

Do you invite visiting children to Sunday School and have somebody designated to take them to the classroom?

 

And for members of the visiting congregation - what do you do if you find that the service, and particularly the sermon, are so far from your theological perspective that you feel uncomfortable just being there?

 

I thought you meant sharing space. That is something I do. I share space with a Baptist congregation and their pastor. Yes, you read that right. It works and we have had joint services also... where both of us lead worship together. No lightning bolts and no trying to convert each other... we share the Christian faith, respect and a caring for the people ( always diverse in any community).

We learned the hard way that we don't do joint services in the summer. It cost us $1800 in givings one year. There are three United Chuch congregaions in our city. We only worship together once a year, the Sunday between Christmas and New Years.

DKS - I think that we would also have to consider the people we might loose over the summer.  Some might decide to continue attending the other church.  Or, with their home church closed they might take the opportunity to go church-shopping and find another congregation altogether. 

 

 

I don't see much of that. There is some "circulation of the saints" in any case.

I thought maybe you were trying to attract people and were serving marajuanna to anyone who came from the two congregation - thus joint.

Ok here's an Edmonton solution 2 nearby united churches share summer services-theologically similar. The host church offers physical space and time of service (the usual times are 1/2 hour apart) and of course has coffee/tea after the service.

The "visiting " church runs the service.

Offering is to whoever envelopes are for.

In July it's 2 weeks at church A followed by 2 weeks at church B.

Everyone seems fairly comforable as it is either their home church OR they know the people leading the service.

 

That would be biblical, would it not?

 

Yes, Chansen, as biblical as it gets

 We have done that and about every other variation over the years. We no longer do it, as we take a huge financial hit. We are just too tribal.

 

Oh and the bulletins contain announcement pages from both congregations.

Gee DKS-as more folks contribute by PAR I thought loss of offering income would be less of a problem.

 Not everyone contributes by PAR, thank goodness. We still have a significant cash/cheque culture who want to physically make that gift in worship (a practice I personally support and endorse).  We also have sufficient PAR givers who give enough to match a weekly offering. I call it our Sixth Sunday of the Month.  

We only worship together occasionally with other congregations. Last year at Easter, 4 or 5 congregations got together for a Sunrise service at a neutral location - the beach! The ministers shared the leadership evenly and one congregation provided the musicians. The previous year four congregations got together for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. One congregation hosted the Maundy Thursday service and the other three each hosted a different style of Good Friday service: contemporary, traditional and contemplative. In each case, a minister from the host congregation worked with a minister from another one of the congregations involved. I thought this was a wonderful idea - and wish we could do more of it!

I just noticed the second part of Seeler's question - about joint activities. For a couple of years we shared a youth group with another United Church congregation. We stopped doing this, however, mainly because our youth weren't enjoying it. The two groups seemed to have different reasons for being - their youth seemed to view youth group as a hang out time, whereas ours chose to come to youth group (as opposed to other activities on a Friday night) because they also wanted some spiritual nourishment. I'm not trying to sound like a braggart, but our kids were far more mature than the kids in the other group - and the behaviour of the other kids often made ours feel quite uncomfortable.