Keep busy the Sabbath day

“We can give people their weekends back,” James Griffin recently promised in a talk that went viral on X.

The thing is, Griffin isn’t an employer. He’s a pastor. Of a Christian church. He was explaining how the church had added a Thursday night option for gathering so that folks wouldn’t have to come to church on Sunday.

“Our elders and our leaders got together,” Griffin told the congregation at Crosspoint City Church in northwest Georgia. “We said, OK, culture has obviously changed. Sunday is no longer the sacred day — it’s just another day.”

It is inevitable that Christianity will clash with the culture. Christ promised as much. St. Paul implored the Romans, “Be not conformed to this age, but be transformed.”

St. Paul and the early apostles had to overcome a lot of cultural impediments to Christianity, but they didn’t face the cultural headwinds of northwest Georgia. “We got travel sports on the weekends,” Griffin explained.

In facing such a foe, Griffin and his elders opted to be conformed to the age. “We can whine about it, and complain about it, and try to fight against it. Or we can just beat culture at its own game,” the pastor explained. “So that we can give people their weekends back, and they can still be in church.”

“Give people their weekends back”? That implies Christianity took away people’s weekends. Were there even weekends 2,000 years ago? There was the Jewish Sabbath, instituted by God and conveyed to the people by Moses. How much of Protestant America is ready to keep holy the Sabbath?

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If anything, it’s the sports coaches who need to give people their weekends back. Travel sports have become a golden calf — a god that middle-class and upper-middle-class families put before the Lord and worship.

What will pastor James Griffin do when those travel tournaments start on Thursday nights?