Want People to Come to Church? Email them!

Send them an email! When the folks at unseminary.com asked 81 churches to send members an email on Saturday and then measure to see if it affected attendance, here's what they found:

57% of the churches that sent Saturday email saw a week-over-week increase in attendance.

Saturday is typically the "lowest volume" day for incoming emails and it also has the highest open rates.

The increase in attendance among all the churches was over 1,000 people.

—Rich Birch, "Do Saturday Emails Increase Sunday Church Attendance?" Unseminary.com

10 Commandments Remix

Last December "Two professing atheist authors held a contest in which they asked followers to 'rethink the Ten Commandments' and come up with 'an alternative secular version … for the modern age.'" The contest resulted in more than 2,800 submissions from 18 countries. The entries were evaluated by a panel of 13 judges, including Adam Savage from the Discovery Channel's Myth Busters and Greg Epstein, executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. The winning entries:

Be open-minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence.
Strive to understand what is most likely to be true, not to believe what you wish to be true.
The scientific method is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world.
Every person has the right to control over their body.
God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life.
Be mindful of the consequences of all your actions and recognize that you must take responsibility for them.
Treat others as you would want them to treat you, and can reasonably expect them to want to be treated. Think about their perspective.
We have the responsibility to consider others, including future generations.
There is no one right way to live.
Leave the world a better place than you found it.

No word whether the atheist Big Ten will spark a movie with a Charlton Heston lookalike.

—Heather Clark, "There Is No Right Way to Live: Atheists Invent Their Own Ten Commandments," Christiannews.net.

The Only Time Some Can Worship

The Vineyard church in Syracuse, New York, recently added a Thursday night service. Pastor John Elmer explains: "I realized what a huge need there was for it. A third of the American workforce works on the weekend. At least 60% of families with children between the ages of 6-17 participate in organized sports, with many of those having weekend events. … Throw in both parents working and chores to be done, lawns to be mowed and families just wanting to spend time together, and church on the weekend wasn't always making it on the calendar."

—Tony Morgan, "Thursday Is the New Sunday," TonyMorganLive.com.