By sharing preaching responsibilities, Sunday evening services have been reestablished for three Christian Reformed Church congregations in the northwest corner of Indiana. About 70 congregants attended the first evening service Oct. 5 at New Life Christian Reformed Church in Highland, Ind.
New Life, Hammond (Ind.) CRC, and Beacon Light Community CRC in Gary, Ind., are collaborating for the services, held at New Life since it is centrally located with a larger building. It had been several years since any of them hosted evening services of their own, a former staple of Christian Reformed worship. When pastors Cedric Parsels, Jonathan Allen, and Joshua Christoffels met for breakfast one morning in early summer 2025, they decided it would be a great idea to bring back Sunday evening services, but this time each pastor would preach only one sermon a month and invite guest pastors or seminary students from the nearby MidAmerica Reformed Seminary to preach on the fourth Sunday. After each pastor proposed the idea to their respective church councils in July and August meetings, all agreed they were ready to proceed this fall.
“We thought that doing something collaboratively would help to draw us closer together as churches in fellowship and worship,” said Christoffels. “It would also help us know how to pray for the other churches,” by hearing their concerns in prayer week to week.
In the past, two services each Lord’s Day (Sunday) were expected in Christian Reformed congregations, as laid out in Article 51-b of the Church Order (the account of regulations that member churches commit to keeping together), with one of the services set aside for “preach(ing) the Word as summarized in the creeds and confessions of the church, especially the Heidelberg Catechism” (Art. 54-b, removed by Synod 2022). The commitment to the second service gradually waned, and Synod 2019 proposed altering the Church Order to reflect the prevalent practice. Between 2017 and 2025 an average of 57.73% of respondents chose “(This church) does not have evening services” in response to the question “How often do you attend Sunday evening worship services?” in the denomination’s annual survey.
Christoffels said the rationale that he and the other pastors presented to their church councils in support of the shared services included, “The Christian Reformed Church has experienced a revival in its commitment to being a confessionally Reformed church. But this has come with the awareness that CRC churches, in general, have not done a good job promoting and defending our confessional teachings. The evening service was one of the primary means that this confessional education continued into adulthood for our members.”
In the first few services of this new collaboration, sermons have addressed the Five Solas (essential teachings) of the Reformation.
About the Author
Sarah DeGraff is a freelance news correspondent for The Banner. She lives in Madison, Wisc., where she is studying for her Masters in Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin.