I hope you’re getting excited as we get closer and closer to Easter. 

There’s been times when the closer we got to Easter, the more stressed I became.

I hope that isn’t the case for you. Celebrating the resurrection shouldn’t be stressful. It should be one of the most joyful days of the year.

If you’re feeling more stress than joy, give yourself a break. Take a day off this week and go do something you enjoy. I promise it will be more beneficial than sitting in your office worrying about things you can’t control.

Alright, pep talk over. Let’s dive in. 

By now you should have

• A prayer team praying.
• Invite cards being handed out.
• Social media posts scheduled.
• The church website updated.
• Volunteers scheduled.
• An order of service finished.
• And an Easter sermon being written.

If you weren’t previously stressed out, you may be now. But if you’ve been following this series, and doing your homework you should be in good shape. If you haven’t, don’t sweat it, just jump in and do what you can.

In this post, I want to give you one more promotional idea, and then we’re going to talk about what you can do after Easter to try to get people to come back to church.

Community Blitz

Sometimes during the week before Easter, we do something called a Community Blitz. The idea is, we want our pastors and church leaders to go into the local community to get the word out about our Easter services.

 We’ve found one of the best ways to do this is by offering a gift. For example, we’ll go buy 20 dozen doughnuts and take a dozen to each business in our town along with our invite cards. We may provide lunch for the teachers at some of our local schools and again leave invite cards. We’ll take Gatorades to the high school baseball practice, and we invite the team to come.

We don’t do this every year, but when we do it’s always very well received. If you’re a church trying to get your name out in the community or maybe you’re trying to change your reputation, this is a great place to start.

The Series After Easter

We’ve talked about this in this series already, but it bears repeating. The goal for any church service should be to get people to come back again. I know we want to “get people saved”, but if we get people to raise their hand or come to an altar, who never show up to a church again, what have we actually accomplished? 

All we’ve done is made ourselves feel good for a moment, because we can post our salvation numbers on social media like some kind of trophy. It’s silly. 

We want people to come back to church so that they continue to hear the word of God, and we need them to build relationships with other believers because that creates the opportunity for discipleship. 

So, you want to plan a sermon series that’s going to peak their interest. 

The Event After Easter

I recently read an article about a study done on life satisfaction. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that people who attend church regularly have a greater overall life satisfaction than anyone else. Even greater than those who make over $100,000 a year.

Can you guess one of the big reasons churchgoers are more satisfied? It actually is because of the friendships they have with the people in their church.

And I’m all in on this idea. I think if you want people to value attending church, a big part of it is helping them build quality friendships within the church.

So, you should plan events that give opportunities for friendships to form and strengthen. A church service, or something similar, is not a great place for this to happen. Sure, you can have some short conversations, but you need more than that. 

Plan an event after Easter with the goal for new people to connect with other people.

Get Contact Info

This probably should’ve been mentioned earlier in this series, but it goes along with thinking through the weeks after Easter. If you’re going to invite people back to the church, or an event, it helps if you have their contact info.

Hopefully the church is going to have new people or people who don’t show up very often, show up on Easter. You need to try to get their contact info. That way you can email them and invite them to your next event or sermon series. 

Sure you can try to rely just on social media to get them back, but that’s not nearly as effective as an email or text message.

There’s a few ways you can try to do this.

• Ask every person in the church to fill out a connection card or guest info form on Easter. If you do this it helps if you combine it with, for every card filled out we’ll make a $5 donation to the local food bank, or something like that.

• Offer a free gift in exchange for a guest’s contact information. We do this with a coffee cup or water bottle and it can be pretty effective if your volunteers are really good at engaging new guests. If they aren’t, you’re going to miss a lot of people.

• Offer a big giveaway to get contact information. This could be, we’re giving away a Playstation 5 to one lucky kid today, and we just need mom and dad’s contact info to get them entered. Higher cost, can be off putting to some people, but can be very effective depending on the prize.

Contact info is valuable, and if you don’t currently have a system for gathering it, you should get one. 

Homework for this Week

• Decide on a sermon series for after Easter.
• Start planning an after Easter event.
• Decide on a system for getting contact information.
• Plan your Community Blitz. (Optional)
• Take a day off and do something you enjoy.