TO SEE PEOPLE FIND AND FOLLOW JESUS
by Brian Moore
Don’t get me wrong, every service is important and every weekend should be treated like the “big game” for Jesus, but at Easter, crowds are larger, opportunities for evangelism are greater, details are heightened, and God’s presence is felt at greater levels. Easter magnifies the Word and the worship.
To maximize opportunities for people to find and follow Jesus on Easter, you need to focus on four things: prayer, promotion, personal evangelism, and preservation.
Prayer
1. I challenge our deacons, trustees, and small group leaders to pray and lead the way, and we call our church to special times of prayer on Tuesdays from 9:00-9:30 a.m. to pray specifically for Easter.
2. I give all staff members two weeks to come up with five people they plan to invite to Easter services and we write them on the white board during a staff meeting. We then begin to pray for these people together.
3. We challenge our staff, leaders, and entire church to go on a spiritual growth journey leading up to Easter through daily devotionals. We recommend Easter Every Day by Jim Denison (available for download at www.denisonforum.org)
4. On Palm Sunday, we hand out cards and ask people to write down names of five local non-churched people they commit to pray for and invite to Easter services.
5. Forty days prior to Easter, we challenge our church to fast and pray for Easter weekend. We ask them to fast from something such as chocolate, caffeine, or social media so they can feast on God.
Promotion
1. A difficulty of Easter is that it’s not on the same day every year. Very few people wake up Easter Sunday and decide to go to church, so each year we have to get the word out about the date. The Holy Spirit may be working in someone’s life, and we want our promotion to help serve as a catalyst for action. Paul explains the principle in Romans 10:14, “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?”
2. We have used direct mail campaigns through a U.S. Postal Service program called Every Door Direct Mail (go to www.usps.com and search for EDDM). It is cost-effective and you can even ask about special rates for non-profit entities. Remember, evangelism is not an expense. It is an investment.
3. We love to use business-card-size invitations. We emphasize not just inviting people, but bringing people with you. These small cards are great tools in the hands of our people.
4. Yard signs are another visual to get the word out about Easter. Families and kids love to take these and put them in their yards.
5. At Crosspointe, we use social media as a countdown reminder as the date for Easter gets closer. We also ask our people to change their profile pictures to our Easter graphic, which we make available on our website.
6. When designing your visual promotions, make Easter the headline of your promotion and not the name of the series. Put the new series at the bottom of the promotion rather than at the top.
7. We will invest money into Facebook sponsored ads, Google AdWords, etc., but keep it simple. I love to post Facebook videos about inviting my friends. Showing a fun video in church is another great way to get the word out about Easter.
8. Every Palm Sunday, I preach on sharing our faith and inviting people to church. We usually share a live or video testimony of someone who accepted Jesus the previous year as a result of being invited to church.
Personal evangelism
1. As pastors, we have to get out of our office bubble. It is important to model personal evangelism for your people. Talk about (from the pulpit) who you are inviting and how you are inviting them. Do this every week for four weeks leading up to Easter. One reason I’m involved in the Chamber of Commerce is to share my faith and invite unsaved people I have a relationship with to church.
2. Palm Sunday is also a great day for communion. We take the elements and then challenge people to hand out ten invite cards before Easter Sunday.
3. If you are not already doing multiple services, Easter is a great time to try the idea. It is probably good to test the schedule one to two weeks before Easter to work out the kinks. If you are going to add a service, be mindful of your regular service times when planning. If you normally meet at 10:00 a.m., have one service at 9:30 a.m. and the other at 11:00 a.m. to spread out the crowd.
4. I always start a new teaching series on Easter and emphasize the series will continue the following week. We ask people to commit to the entire series by making it a next step on the connection card. I’m amazed at how many people we retain just simply by asking them to come back for the entire series. We have seen as many as 20 percent of our first-time guests attend the next week and eventually stay at the church by continuing the series with us. Nelson Searcy says, “People are seven times more likely to come back if they check a box saying they will come back.”
5. On Easter Sunday, we make sure a pen is on the bulletin and the connection card is inside the program. This is how we have had the most success in getting contact information from our guests. During the welcome, we announce we will donate $1 to mannaworldwide.com in honor of each guest who turns in a connection card. We show a picture on the screen of the feeding centers and children we support.
6. Don’t rush the welcome time. Have music playing in the background and have the person doing the welcome actually fill out their own connection card right then on the stage. You can generate positive peer pressure by asking everyone (both members and guests) to fill out the card in order to update the church’s database.
7. An idea I learned from Rick Warren is to do a simple spiritual survey on the connection card. Have the letters A, B, C, and D printed on the back of your connection card, and during the invitation ask people to complete the survey as follows:
A. Circle A if you have Already accepted Jesus
B. Circle B if you Believed in Jesus for the first time today
C. Circle C if you are Considering it
D. Circle D if you Don’t care
We take the offering at the end of the service so we can collect those cards.
8. On Easter, we do a spontaneous baptism for anyone who accepts Jesus. We tell them, “There is no greater day to accept Jesus and be baptized than Easter. It symbolizes the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and the death of your old life, your sin, yourself. You are being raised up in a new life in Jesus.”
Preservation
1. We have people who follow up on the cards on Sunday afternoon. You will need extra people to do data-entry and follow-up, so prepare now!
2. We send personalized emails to the following:
- First-time guests inviting them back for part two of the series the following weekend.
- Those who checked B on the card — inviting them to a special dessert at the pastor’s home.
- Those who were baptized — inviting them to the membership class.
- Those who volunteered — thanking them for going out of their way to make Easter special.
3. Try to make Easter services as normal as possible so there isn’t a disappointment when people come back. People need to hear the senior pastor speak, so it’s probably not the best time to bring in a guest speaker or musician.
4. Be careful not to overdo it when it comes to your volunteers. If people are bringing friends, they can be excused from volunteer duties. Run a lean machine on Easter.
5. Parents are going to ask their children two questions after Easter services:
- “Did you have fun?” — Make sure the answer is always, “Yes!” Have pictures with the Easter bunny, do an egg hunt, give a gift bag, candy, etc. Make that child feel special. We want to put a smile on the face of every kid who attends our services.
- “What did you learn today?” — Give parents a page explaining the lesson so they know the right questions to ask. Our job is to lead kids to find and follow Jesus, so present one big idea that can lead them in that direction.
Easter is hard work, both in preparation and execution. I pray the following prayer as I lead the Easter charge at our church, “God, I will do the possible. I will pray and fast, promote, personally evangelize, and do my part to preserve the people you will give us on Easter. And God, I’m relying on you to do the impossible, the thing I can’t do — change people’s hearts and lives!”