Plymouth Heights is in step with a larger trend of declining evening attendance in evangelical denominations that long have cherished a heritage of worshiping twice on Sunday. Some evening services are more intimate; others have been cancelled or replaced by an alternative.

Researchers wrote that the data “seems to suggest evening service attendance has become optional.”

“Many churches are substituting evening worship and putting their energies into other things,” said Jeff Meyer, pastor of Crosswinds Community Church, a 4-year-old CRC congregation in Holland, Mich., that, like many new churches, does not conduct evening worship.

“We just saw incremental diminishing returns (in attendance),” Smith said. “Younger families were much busier with all the humming and bumming of life and they found other ways to refresh themselves. The evening service was a wonderful thing back in its heyday, but it cannot continue to function in the same form that it has historically. For a lot of churches, that’s really a harsh reality.”

The harsh reality, in the Rev. David Engelsma’s view, is that churches that drop evening worship are ignoring their spiritual inheritance. The retired seminary professor calls the trend “plain evidence of the great apostasy that Christ has predicted.”

“The two services is a way to frame the whole day as belonging to Lord,” Rienstra said. “The decline of Sunday evening worship is a marker alongside many that our culture is becoming more popularly secular. We’ve lost a sense of sacred time that is being offered back to God.”