4 Ways to Ramp Up Your Easter Outreach

[Chris Walker]

"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

What the numbers might mean for Easter Sunday

Let's say this statistic would hold true for your congregation.

If you had 100 members, and 30 of them made personal invitations.

We know that not all invitations will be accepted.

But if half of them accepted and brought their families, you will have 15-60 visitors in your congregation on Easter.

That's huge potential!

Potential Impact and Reach of Easter Sunday

Some of them will be out of town visitors who won't come back any time soon, but several will be local.

Some may be seekers and your church can have that evangelistic impact of influencing their decision to follow Christ!

Some of them will connect with your congregation and join you on your mission to the community.

Launching a sermon series at the same time will give your new visitors reason to make that second and third visit.

4 Ways to Maximize your Easter Outreach

1. Call your members into a season of prayer for 3-4 weeks ahead of Easter.

Our church is currently in a 21 day season of prayer in preparation for Lent.

Each morning our pastor emails us 3 scriptures to read and some guidance for prayer, and we commit to 3 times of prayer during the day - 9am, 3pm, and 9pm.

Praying through these Scriptures and the prayer guidance takes about half an hour each time.

As I'm praying through these items, I'm

• thinking about the sermon series that is coming,
• praying that we'd encounter people wrestling with the series topic.
• giving invitations to come and join us.
• praying for the particular friends on my prayer list.
• praying for my community - it's schools, the government, businesses.

Prayer is preparing me, as well as preparing the church for the spiritual work of evangelism that is coming.

Possible Action steps before Easter:

• Find a short 21 day email prayer guide, or create your own
• Launch a "Pray for 5 neighbors, 5 minutes a day for 5 weeks or something similar."
• Ask God for opportunities to invite people.
• Read 10 ways to pray for more invitations.

2. Fix and update your church website for Easter.

With the invitations that your church will be making this Easter, potential visitors will check out your website to learn who you are, what they might experience on Easter Sunday.

Nothing is worse than for someone to get an intriguing advertisement drives them to your church website only to find something that's out of date and embarrassing.

• Have a promo piece for your Easter sermon series on your church home page.
• Clearly list any special Easter services on your home page.
• Special webpage for the sermon series or Easter.
• Refresh your webpage following this checklist.
• Make sure your address and directions are on the footer of every page.

3. Enable your members to easily give invitations for Easter.

• Make flyers or business cards for members to give away.
• Use social networking tools to raise awareness of your Easter service. 
• Pastor, make sure you are personally inviting people to church this Easter.

4. Review and refresh your Hospitality systems prior to Easter

• Refresh the vision of the importance of hospitality for Easter.
• Sneak in a last minute training for hospitality volunteers before Easter Sunday.
• Review your systems for hospitality to see what you can fix right now (download a free hospitality audit).
• Review your systems for follow-up contact.

 

About Chris Walker

Chris Walker is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and is the principal writer for Evangelism Coach.

He has studied evangelism and church growth ever since working for a Billy Graham crusade over 20 years ago, and has led countless training seminars throughout North and South America in many different denominations.

Get Chris's material for pastors at http://www.EvangelismCoach.org/category/pastors