Your Journey Blog

11 Keys to an Explosive Easter Service

"Overall, 31% of active churchgoers said they would definitely invite someone they know who does not usually attend a church to accompany them to a church service on Easter weekend this year."  Barna Group

In light of this research, if you have an average church attendance of 300, I believe that you could easily see 30-50% (100-150) increase at your Easter Service.  But what if you put some effort into it?  What if you spent 3 months planning and preparing your congregation for an explosive and transformational Easter this year?  I really believe that healthy churches can double their average attendance on Easter which will have a residual impact for the rest of the year.

With Easter falling later on the calendar this year, April 8, you have an opportunity to have one of your largest Easter attendances in the history of your church. Here are a few principles that you can apply in planning to have an Explosive Easter this year.

1.  Believe it can happen.

Leading a congregation can be a lonely and discouraging assignment. Helping pastors keep their heads in the game is one of the things I do all the time. It is so easy to get caught up with the negative distractions that ministry brings that we can get our eyes off the thousands of people who are so far from God but really close to us. Jesus said to his distracted disciples, "Don't you have a saying, 'It's still four months until harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest." (John 4:35)  What do you do as a leader to keep your eyes on the harvest? What do you need to do to keep your staff, leaders and church's eyes on the harvest? God is at work in your community! Do you believe it? Can you see through the eyes of faith the lives of families and neighbors who can be changed by the power of the gospel?

2. Have a record setting mentality.

What has been the largest Easter Service in the history of your church? What is holding you back to see it happen this year? The previous point deals with your belief in God and His redemptive work in the world. This point deals with your belief in your church, your team and God's work within and through your church. If you don't think it can happen as a leader then you and the church are in trouble. If you don't believe it then no one else will. What is keeping you for setting new Easter attendance record in the life of your church? 

3. Get your key influencers involved.

Getting key influencers involved in the process is vital to building positive momentum. Getting these individuals involved in planning and promoting your service is critical. Filling these individuals excitement about setting a new record and touching lives with the gospel is key, because it will spread infectiously throughout the congregation.

Too many pastors try to carry the load all by themselves, which is an unbiblical notion. Christianity is a team sport. Team building is one of the skills successful pastors need in their tool belts. Learning to pick the right players on your team is crucial. Guiding and leading the team is imperative. I encourage pastors to use short-term task forces with a specific task along with a starting and ending point.  If you build a task force for each of your major outreach initiatives for the Fall, Winter and Spring, your team building skills will improve each time and the impact on your congregation will dramatically improve. HT

4.  Put some effort into planning for before, during and after your Easter service
I call this the "three month rule" which is to begin the detailed planning process at least three months before launch of the outreach campaign.  Here is an overview of what would happen in those three months:

Three D's of Event Planning

• Develop a punch list - generating a complete list of 'to do's' with due dates that that need to be completely to insure a successful event.
• Determine a time line - listing major objectives 3 months before the event and 1 month after the event.
• Delegate assignments to your team - empower your team to own the tasks that need to be completed.
  • Here are the major areas that need to be covered
    • Intercession
    • Communication - Membership Awareness
    • Marketing & Promotion to Community
    • Worship Service Planning & Preparation
    • Follow up & Come back events

  5.  Promote prayer & fasting for friends, neighbors and family.

It is a must to incorporate a church wide prayer project for before and during the campaign. One example: Call the church to "pray for five neighbors, for five minutes a day, for five weeks" before the outreach campaign. Tim Beavis of The Orchard Church in McHenry developed a "Who is my neighbor?" campaign with this concept. Check out the card he used to encourage his church to pray for their neighbors.  You might consider using 2 identical cards in your church, one for the individual to hand in to the church for the prayer team to pray over and the other of the individual to take home with them.  In addition to this you could also call the church to a season of prayer and fasting.

6. Start recruiting help for Easter early.

Here is the principle, "The more people get involved the more likely they are to invite people to attend." Recruiting, deploying, and encouraging volunteers at all levels is vital to the success of your Easter Outreach.

Generate a list of Entry Level Service Opportunities

• Set Up
• Take Down
• Nursery
• Greeter
• Usher
• Hostess
• Sound Tech
• Musician
• Food Preparation
• Choir
• Children’s Ministries
• Video Production
• Audio Ministry
• Small Group Host
• Office Assistance
• Event Production
• Marketing Team
• Website Production

7. Write a personal letter to every member of the church about the Easter Service(s).

Leaders lead and sending a letter to your congregation shows initiative and leadership.  Make a heart felt appeal to your people to make this the best Easter ever in the life of your church.  The letter should contain the following:

• An enthusiastic vision: Why I am excited about this Easter Service?
• Encouragement & ideas for inviting friends: What invitational tools can I encourage them to use?
• Invite them to get involved: What serving opportunities do I need to specifically promote?
• Get the specific details: What logistical details do I need to share with them?
• Remind them of the reality of the resurrection in their lives: How can I encourage them to experience the victorious life promised in the resurrection?

See Sample Letter

8. Reach out to the fringe people of your church.

Send a special invitation or a personal note to all your visitors from the last two the years. There is nothing like a personal touch when it comes to outreach.  In may cases the most receptive people you can reach have already attended your services at some point.

9. Cast seeds of awareness to the community at large.

This principle is that you will always have to cast more seed than you think to get a significant impact. I encourage churches to spend 5-10% of their budget on marketing outreach.  If you are facing a certain growth barrier you will need to kick that up to 10-15%.

Here are a couple of posts on the various ways to sowing seeds of awareness through relationships and throughout the community.

• Sowing Seeds Through Your Webs of Relationships
• Sowing Seeds of Love in Your Community
• Sowing Seeds Through Servant Evangelism #1, #2, #3
• Sowing Seeds Through Marketing #1, #2, #3

10. Preach a message on personal evangelism the Sunday before Easter.

Laying a biblical foundation and creating a heightened awareness for personal evangelism with the immediate application of inviting someone to Easter will really pay off in the long run. In recent years evangelism training in local churches has really been neglected. In making this part of your strategy you create a new discipline so that great commission living becomes infused into the life of your church.

11. Deliver the best Easter Service(s) to date. 

You will need to communicate throughout the staff and volunteers that we want to put your best foot forward in this Easter Service. By creating a sense of urgency and taking steps to raise the quality of your service will have a lasting impact on your church.

It is important that you raise the quality of the service, not dramatically change your service or try to create an over-the-top experience. Turning your service into a Easter Extravaganza can back fire on you. 1) It does not represent who you are on a normal Sunday. 2) It can create a let down in your first time attender who returns the next week. 3) In bringing outside speakers or worship leaders you don't improve.  Nelson Searcy writes, "Make your Easter service excellent, but keep it normal. If you are the one who usually preaches, preach on Easter. Have your regular worship leader lead worship on Easter. The goal with your Easter service planning should be this: To provide a great, quality service that reflects what attenders will see the rest of the year. When you get too fancy in your efforts to capitalize on Easter, you step out of the realm of reality and that can only lead to disillusionment." 

Here are some other resources to help you have an Explosive Easter.

This Easter Outreach Idea Works by Chuck Warnock

18 Easter Factors by C Michael Johnson

Marketing Your Church for Easter by John E. Squiric

 

I was wrong - Seth Godin

In 1993, I saw the web coming. I was hired to write the cover story for a now defunct computer magazine about the internet, and dismissed the new Mosaic browser in a single paragraph.

I figured the web was just like Prodigy, but slower, harder to use and without a business model.

About as expensive a wrong analysis as a single entrepreneur with an email company could make in 1993.

The reason it was an insanely valuable lesson: I got better at announcing that I was wrong, learning from it and doing the next thing.

Politicians, of course, are terrible at this. They are never wrong, apparently, and when they are, spin instead of admitting it. Which not only hurts their trustworthiness, it prevents them from learning anything.

Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Coming clean is essential for leadership but it is crucial for spiritual health. The Apostle John writes, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." I John 1:8-10 (ESV)

Americans and their spiritual apathy - USA Today

In Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAYarticle: "For many, 'Losing My Religion' isn't just a song: It's life" offers a anecdotal and statistical information on the rise of spiritual apathy in Americans.

When Ben Helton signed up for an online dating service, under "religion" he called himself "spiritually apathetic."

Helton, 28, and Dohm, 54, aren't atheists, either. They simply shrug off God, religion, heaven or the ever-trendy search-for-meaning and/or purpose. Their attitude could be summed up as "So what?"

"The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiritual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal," says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

Only now, however, are they turning up in the statistical stream. Researchers have begun asking the kind of nuanced questions that reveal just how big the So What set might be:

• 44% told the 2011 Baylor University Religion Survey they spend no time seeking "eternal wisdom," and 19% said "it's useless to search for meaning."
• 46% told a 2011 survey by Nashville-based evangelical research agency, LifeWay Research, they never wonder whether they will go to heaven.
• 28% told LifeWay "it's not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose." And 18% scoffed that God has a purpose or plan for everyone.
• 6.3% of Americans turned up on Pew Forum's 2007 Religious Landscape Survey as totally secular — unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not important in their lives.

Hemant Mehta, who blogs as The Friendly Atheist, calls them the "apatheists"

The Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C., calls them honest.

"We live in a society today where it is acceptable now to say that they have no spiritual curiosity. At almost any other time in history, that would have been unacceptable," Budde says.

She finds this "very sad because the whole purpose of faith is to be a source of guidance, strength and perspective in difficult times. To be human is to have a sense of purpose, an awareness that our life is an utterly unique expression of creation and we want to live it with meaning, grace and beauty."

'We might as well be cars'

Nah, Helton says.

Helton, a high school band teacher in Chicago, only goes to the Catholic Church of his youth to hear his mother sing in the choir.

His mind led him away. The more Helton read evolutionary psychology and neuro-psychology, he says, the more it seemed to him, "We might as well be cars. That, to me, makes more sense than believing what you can't see."

Ashley Gerst, 27, a 3-D animator and filmmaker in New York, shifts between "leaning to the atheist and leaning toward apathy."

"I would just like to see more people admit they don't believe. The only thing I'm pushy about is I don't want to be pushed. I don't want to change others and I don't want to debate my view," Gerst says.

Most So Whats are like Gerst, says David Kinnaman, author of You Lost Me on young adults drifting away from church.

They're uninterested in trying to talk a diverse set of friends into a shared viewpoint in a culture that celebrates an idea that all truths are equally valid, he says. Personal experience, personal authority matter most. Hence Scripture and tradition are quaint, irrelevant, artifacts. Instead of followers of Jesus, they're followers of 5,000 unseen "friends" on Facebook or Twitter.

"I think Jesus is getting lost in the data stream," says Kinnaman, president of the Christian research firm The Barna Group.

" 'Spiritual' is the hipster way of saying they're concerned with social injustice. But if you strip away the hipster factor," says Kinnaman, "I'd estimate seven in 10 young adults would say they don't see much influence of God or religion in their lives at all."

The 'Nones' are rising

This trend may have been leaving subtle tracks for years.

The hot religion statistical trend of recent decades was the rise of the "Nones" — the people who checked "no religious identity" on the American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS). The Nones numbers leapt from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008.

The So Whats appear to be a growing secular subset. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Landscape Survey dug in to the Nones to discover that nearly half said they believed "nothing in particular."

Neither raging atheist scientist Richard Dawkins, author of numerous best sellers such asThe God Delusion, nor televangelist Pat Robertson would understand this fuzzy stance, says Barry Kosmin, co-author of the ARIS and director Institute for the Study of Secularism at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

"But a lot of these people are concerned more with the tangible, the real stuff like mortgages or their favorite football team or the everyday world," Kosmin says.

The Rev. Ema Drouillard, who specializes in San Francisco-area non-denominational ceremonies, said in 2001 about 30% of her clients refused any reference to religion at their weddings.

A decade later, 80% of her clients choose her carefully God-free ceremony. The only faith they pledge is in each other. No higher authority is consulted as they vow to walk beside each other, "offering courage and hope through all your endeavors."

"A lot of people just aren't on any spiritual path. They say, 'We are just focusing on the party.' Or they have no language for their spirituality so they just leave it out," Drouillard says.

When church historian Diana Butler Bass researched her upcoming book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, she found the So Whats are "a growing category."

Says Bass, "We can't underestimate the power of the collapse of institutional religion in the first 10 years of this century. It's freed so many people to say they don't really care. They don't miss rituals or traditions they may never have had anyway."

For them, the Almighty is off the radar, like some tiny foreign country they know exists but never think about.

"God? Purpose? You don't need an opinion on those things to function," says Suhas Sreedhar, 26, a engineer working in a computer company in Manhattan.

Raised in New Jersey by his devoutly Hindu mother and staunchly atheist father, "I was saturated with both views and after a while, I realized I don't need either perspective.

"There may be unanswerable questions that could be cool or fascinating. Speculating on them is a fun parlor game, but they don't shed any meaning on my life," Sreedhar says.

Goodness more than Godliness

This is a disaster for Christians, says Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research,

"If you're not worried about heaven, you won't notice or care if Jesus is essential your salvation. You're not thinking about any consequences," McConnell says.

But Rabbi Micah Greenstein of Temple Israel, Memphis, is not so alarmed. He sees people behaving spiritually — caring for each other and the world — even if they skip the label.

"Judaism teaches that spirituality is practical. When you see something that is broken, fix it. When you find something that is lost, return it. When you see something that needs to be done, do it. In that way you will be taking care of the world and fulfilling your role as God's partner, know it or not," the rabbi says.

"Spirituality is about the relational — whether you are relating to God, to others, to the world or to yourself. I do believe most people see life more as a mystery than as a machine. I would call that God even if they don't," Greenstein says.

Bill Dohm, who lives in Broad Run, Va., is more inclined to talk about goodness than Godliness.

"I try to live my life and do the best I can. I figure if I do good, good things will happen. I'm not at all worried about the afterlife. How could they turn me down when people do whatever they want during the week. They go to church all the time then they come home and they gamble, they party, they use God's name in vain.

"So either it will be like a switch turned off and it's done or, if there is a heaven, I'm going have to do some talking to get up there."

Until then, every week, he faithfully drives to a Catholic church where, he says, "I drop off my mother-in-law, get back in the car and drive home."

HT