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Church follow-up idea: Thank you cards
Here’s an idea my church has been trialling.
The goal is to help connect with people who visit church, but for various reasons may not want to stick around for long after the service. We want to do our best to connect with people who visit, and allow them to explore more of our church after they leave. We also want to hear about their first impressions. Ultimately, it’s about caring for the people God brings along to our church.
To this end, we’ve designed a simple card that we look to hand to guests at the end of the service. The idea isn’t to overwhelm them with information, but to thank them for coming, and to encourage them to visit our website.
Here’s what the card looks like:
Side A
Side B
It’s not too late for your church to design something similar for Easter services!
Keller on how church size impacts volunteer recruitment
“The larger the church, the harder it is to recruit volunteers and thus a more well-organized volunteer recruitment process is required. Why is this so? First, the larger the church, the more likely it is that someone you don’t know well will try to recruit you. It is much easier to say no to someone you do not know than to someone you know well. Second, it is easier to feel less personally responsible for the ministries of a large church: “They have lots of people here—they don’t need me.” Therefore, the larger the church, the more well-organized and formal the recruitment of volunteers must be.”
How long should you preach for?
Andy Stanley:
There are people like Jeff who can engage you for an hour and a half in your chair, and they should go an hour and a half. And there are other communicators who can’t keep you engaged for more than 15 or 20 minutes, and they shouldn’t talk longer than that. Because once I am disengaged, then I begin to process the information as: this is irrelevant; church is irrelevant; God is irrelevant; the Bible is irrelevant. And all of a sudden I am learning the opposite lesson. I am drawing conclusions that are opposite of what the communicator is trying to make me draw because I am disengaged.
Read more here.
REAP Photo Contest
St Paul’s Castle Hill developed a Bible reading journal – REAP.
They’ve come up with a great idea – the REAP Photo Contest. It sounds like a great idea to get people reading the Bible.
Promoting Easter at Church by the Bridge (2012)
At Church by the Bridge this year, we’ve adopted two new approaches to our Easter promotion.
- We’re promoting Good Friday services as the entry point (rather than overwhelming people with details of all 10 services on all promotional pieces). Once people come to a Good Friday service we can invite them to other services on the weekend, but this is the place we’d like to encourage them to start. Details of all services are on the Easter website.
- We’re adopting a more personal approach to our Easter promotion – emphasising the people whose lives have been changed because of what happened at Easter. We want to communicate that Easter is an event that continues to change lives – lives of people just like you. To do this, we photographed members and asked them what Easter meant to them. These photos and messages have been used on postcards, posters and online. Check out the postcards below.
A big thank you to the people who made this possible – Dave, Hayley, Robert and Karen – as well as the people who were willing to have their photo taken and share what Easter means to them. We pray that God would use these efforts to make his name known and glorified this Easter.
Postcards
