My least favorite part of any worship service is the announcement time.  There are so many things wrong with it and there are so few ways to actually fix it.  I’m starting to think we should do away with the whole enterprise.

Many Episcopal churches place the announcements in the middle of the service.  Honestly, there’s nothing funnier than getting about 45 minutes into a 60 minute service and have someone say “Welcome!”  Oh, but if you put it at the beginning, the latecomers will miss all of this really important information.  Plus it doesn’t set our minds appropriately for worship.  We also can’t put it at the end, because everybody is trying to get out of there, so they aren’t listening anyway.  Besides, nothing says “go do ministry!” like 20 minutes of horrible improv.  And just so you know, we did cover this in seminary!

I hate announcement time.  I hate it, whether I’m up front or in the pew.  I hate it!  And it always has at least three invitations:

1. To the group of weird people covering some esoteric and seemingly unrelated topic;
2. To the group raising funds for some cause you wish you cared more about but still feel guilty that you don’t feel guilty enough to give to; and
3. To the group that is meeting at a time you can’t attend because you work or it covers the topic you want but you happen to be the wrong sex or age to participate.

Every Sunday, we get these same types of announcements and they are given in a random order each time.  I try to figure out which will come first based on the person standing up to speak about it.  It would make a great drinking game.

I have two really important reasons to hate the announcement time (this, I’m not kidding about).

It is a liturgical train wreck, especially for the liturgically rigid church.  Nothing says formality like free-form announcements of pot-lucks and senior women’s bible studies.  Even low-church or contemporary church makes announcement time seem fluffy and less a real part of what we do. It just doesn’t feel like it plays a part in our worship.

Few of us listen or attend the functions spoken to during announcement time.  These aren’t big parts of our lives.  We have too many other things going on.  We have “more important” things to attend to.  Like watching animal videos on YouTube.  And that long list of stuff just makes us feel guilty.

A Better Announcement Time

I am not just a complainer, but a solver, so I have two good solutions for dealing with announcements.

The first is simple: don’t do them.  Rarely is there a real need to make regular announcements.  In fact, I have often felt the urge to make mountains out of mole hills just to have something to say during announcement time. Drive people to talk to one another, read the bulletin, and go to the website, Facebook, and Twitter for current information.

The second is to actually incorporate announcements in a meaningful way into your service.  This can be done in a few ways.

• Holy Family, the church that sent me to seminary, begins with a ritual of “feeding the pig”.  This is a time of “thanksgivings and concerns” and is spontaneous and festive.  They open worship this way and it feeds into a more open worship.  This works well in their environment, which isn’t simply “low” church, but innovative.
• New Community Church, in Lagrange, Georgia, a non-denominational church I visited a couple of weeks ago, has announcements at the beginning.  Their worship style is evangelical contemporary and the announcements were simply the way the worship opened.  The “plain-spoken” style was consistent throughout the whole service.
• A “high” liturgical environment can benefit from a few, brief announcements at the middle or shortly before the start of the service.  This seems to work best when kept to only the most essential or a simple description of what we do at the Eucharist with an invitation to come to the table.

The most essential part of worship is not being reminded of something yet again in another way: no weekly reminders of something coming up in 5 weeks that 12 people will show up for.  It is the actual worship, and announcements shouldn’t intrude on that.

My rule is that  announcements should match the environment: if it is casual, bring spontaneity to the time.  If the environment is rigid, a short, uniform time is most appropriate.  And when in doubt, less is more.

Lastly, you might want to take a stronger look at option 1: not doing announcements.  There can be something powerful about bringing something truly important into worship to highlight its importance.  This only happens if announcements are infrequent.  Otherwise, announcing a big campaign or someone’s retirement or a big budget shortfall gets mixed right in with the announcements for the Thanksgiving service at 7 pm and the collection of canned goods that will be taking place out in the narthex for the next three Sundays; you can pick up a list of preferred items next to the drop-off box.

If we believe announcements are important, then let’s make them important enough to be there on Sunday.  Most others can go out by email Monday morning.