Lead Well

It’s the Friday before Easter. You’ve been busy with all the marketing, event planning, service prep, and inviting. You’re probably a little tired and the light at the end of the tunnel that is Monday is looking better and better. But you also have a family and obligations there too. If you’re like me, it’s far too easy to let work overtake the home. All the focus is on what the Church is doing, and your family gets the leftovers. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to you. What can you do? You can’t get out of Good Friday or Saturday’s Egg Hunt or Easter Sunday. It’s your job, and people are counting on you. It’s a struggle and not one that I have perfected. If you asked my wife, she would say I have a long way to go. Regardless, here are 3 tips to celebrate Easter (Or any Holiday) while you’re in ministry.  1. Take a cue from the Service Industry In ministry, it’s easy to take the "woe is me" mentality. You’re the only one who has to work on Easter, while ev...

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash With Easter in just a few weeks, you’re probably deep into prep for the big weekend. Whether you’re doing an egg hunt , planning your worship set , or just getting your volunteers ready , there’s a lot of focus put on this weekend. Not to pile on, but there’s one more thing to consider for Easter. What are you doing this summer? In the past, in the weeks leading up to Easter, I put my VBS and other summer activity planning on hold. However, I realized that this was a mistake. On Easter weekend, you will have more people come to your church than on almost any other day of the year. Whether they’re guests, CEO (Christmas and Easter Only), or all your regulars, almost everyone goes to church that day. Which means that it is a great opportunity to tell them about what’s coming and how they can continue to engage with your church community. Even though many parents aren’t thinking about the summer, yet, in a few weeks they will be. You can get in on th...

Easter Egg Hunts. Love them or hate them, it’s one of the most popular kidmin events leading into the Easter season. I know it’s only February, but if you want to have a successful outreach event, you need to start planning now. This is the second part of my two part series on How to have an Easter Egg Hunt. You can read part 1 here. In that post, I talked about the why, ordering supplies, service planning, and recruiting. In today’s post, we’ll dive deeper and talk about more preparation and what needs to happen on the day of. If you subscribe, I’ll share my to do list that will walk you through every step. How to have an Egg Hunt Part 2 1. Advertise Part of what gets a lot of people to the event is advertising. You can have the greatest event, but if nobody knows about it, you’ve just wasted your time and energy. You may or may not have the skills to create the graphics, ads, banners, and websites necessary to advertise, but either way, the earlier you start producing thes...

Easter Egg Hunts. Love them or hate them, it’s one of the most popular Kidmin events leading into the Easter season. I know it’s only February, but if you want to have a successful outreach event, you need to start planning now. I’ve led over 10 Egg Hunts throughout my career and perfected my system to reach hundreds of kids and families at Easter. I know this system could work for you because of what happened last year. Last year, my previous church decided to do an Egg Drop. They wanted to fly in a helicopter and drop the eggs on a big field. Essentially it’s the same as an Egg Hunt except the egg distributors are 300 feet in the air. Since I left that church at the end of February, I did a lot of the groundwork to set them up for success. One of the last things I gave them was my to do list. By the time Easter weekend rolled around they had hundreds of families show up and the event was a huge success. I pray the same can be true for you. In this series of posts, I’m going ...

Easter is the Super Bowl of Christendom. More people come to church on Easter than any other Sunday of the year. I know last year’s Easter was different than any in recent memory, but now with churches opening up again, and others, like mine in Florida have been open for a while, we’re looking to see the people to come back maybe for the first time in over a year. Looking at 2019’s stats, my ministry doubled in size for that one Sunday. But with all these new people how do we get them to come back? How do we connect them to our church? COVID accelerated a lot of things and one thing I believe it really sped up was the need for community. People are longing for human connection more than a fancy service, great music, or a remarkable guest experience. Don’t get me wrong, we still need those things, but we have to connect them to a community. It’s the people that will get them to come back. I am a children’s pastor, so this follow up plan will have elements specific to that ministry...