More I was aiming at the point of the church operating as a business, employing it's staff and operating as a business does. That makes it an enterprise. Rather, I had in mind, it should come to reinforce the real problem being the way the world operates, is not centered around the lifestyle of the people in it. In this case, that impacts a Christian whose social needs require private time on Sundays. Whereas the world's demands (ie her employer) place the profits of business over the needs of it's staff.
Your example of 24/7 operations makes no sense to that point, then. At this point in time, most people in this particular society have Sunday mornings free. Why would congregations not plan their major meeting when most of their membership is to meet without conflicts?
Your own example is self-conflicting. Businesses schedule their operations to meet their customers' needs, not their staff's proclivities. Hardly anyone wants to work graveyard shift, but a company that discovers a significant graveyard-shift customer base will staff for the graveyard shift regardless of staff desires. Isn't that what you're arguing a church should do?
Of course, my view is influenced by my own dissatisfactions with church operations, as I mentioned being horrified that on Christmas day, perhaps the one day where people might feel especially drawn to enter a church and hear the good news of Christ Jesus, the doors are all locked closed. What has happened to the observing of a holy day in our society? In the churches? More frequently though, I am impacted by the strict 10am start for majority of church congregations in this city. What it means, is I can only visit one church on a Sunday. If I happen to miss the 10am deadline, there is no church that starts at 10.30am. This is my gripe, as the OP must feel too, that churches are not serving the people, they are fixed in their ways. They rush and shuffle and force people to meet on time, speak a bit, cough up some cash, then tootle off to use the rest of the precious day however they want.
My congregation has regular services on Wednesday night, Saturday afternoon, early Sunday morning, mid Sunday morning, and late Sunday morning. The singers and musicians have to get in at 6 am on Sunday morning and don't leave until 2 pm. Those same singers and musicians are also working Wednesday and Saturday. Oh, but you want them to
restart service just
for you if you get there thirty minutes later?
Or do you think they should be starting a new service every 30 minutes...and you want that 24/7 as well?
And, btw, my congregation has both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning services.
However, I don't necessarily agree with your contention that the church building must be open 24/7 just in case someone wanders in. That didn't happen with the 1st century church, and the reason was not because they met in homes. That's simply not the way it's
supposed to work. The regular meetings of the Body of Christ are
not supposed to be evangelistic meetings, but self-support meetings.
Now, I've attended a congregation that looked at the Sunday morning services specifically as "the service you invite an unchurched friend to." The entire service was structured around an evangelistic message. There was a separate later service specifically designed for members with a message intended for believers...and sometimes specific information on the handling of congregation matters.
Let's take the congregation at Jerusalem, for instance. They clearly had specific teaching meetings (held at the temple). They also had meetings where resources were distributed to the members in need--those would be meetings were a lot of private information was revealed and shared among the membership. That was separate from their evangelistic outreach, such as Stephen performed.
No. Hopefully, I will have got there in time to hear His message!
