The Absolutes of the Post-Easter Guest Connection
Easter is an exciting season of celebrating the victory and salvation we have in Jesus, as well as a time of spiritual growth for our churches. Many churches have their highest attendance and their greatest opportunity for sustained growth during the Easter season. We know that many people who don’t normally attend church are open and even willing to attend a church service during Easter.
The question isn’t if people are willing to come to your church during Easter. The question is how will you connect them to your church in the following days, weeks, and months after Easter.
Connection isn’t a single layer concept. It is actually multilayered. Jesus described the Great Commandment in Mark 12:30-31, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
What He was saying is that people need to connect with God emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, and to each other. We need to connect people to our church community, we need to connect them to our church’s mission, and we need to connect them to a personal spiritual encounter with Jesus through our ministries. The more layers you can connect people to the greater the connection.
Ever wonder what to say when you contact guests after they’ve visited the church? Well, no longer! Download this Done-For-You Follow Up Scripts PDF and you’ll be well on your way to communicating with clarity through text, email, and phone.
You need to have a plan in place to connect people who visit your church for Easter, to your church community. This one is easy and simple. What are you going to do to immediately connect your visitors to your church? You do this every single week through your connect cards, guest central, visitor follow up, etc. For Easter, make sure your assimilation and follow up processes are fine tuned and scalable for increased visitors.
I would encourage you to audit your current processes, simplify them, and improve them as much as possible. Our team says that every system and process needs to be simple, clear, and effective. All of our systems need to be tuned up from time to time and looked at with a fresh set of eyes. Also for Easter, make sure that you over emphasize the steps your guests need to take to connect with your church.
As you develop your current process, we want to give you six steps to get guests back after Easter. This will help you as you lock in your guest follow-up strategy post-Easter.
As you fine tune your assimilation systems don’t let them become too corporate and impersonal. Ensure that you make your follow-up strategy personal. There are a lot of automated texting and email follow-up tools out there, but make sure you are creating personal connections. Have all of your staff, elders or key leaders personally call or text your visitors.
Send a handwritten thank you card to them. We use many of our elderly adults and shut ins to write these cards. They love being involved and seeing their church grow. You could also set up coffee or lunch, with pastors or newcomers, the next Sunday; there you can connect personally and answer any questions about the church they may have.
Want to know how to keep your church’s guests coming back week after week after week? Then download this Turn-Key Follow Up Process for Today’s Church PDF.
You also need a plan to connect people who visit your church for Easter to your mission. People are motivated by mission and impact. They buy products from companies that support environmental and charitable causes. They support local organizations that they see do good in their community. And they expect churches to do the same thing. What is your church doing to impact your community? What is your church doing in global missions? The people that visit your church for Easter would love to hear about it.
Our church has a campus in Haiti where we oversee a church in a mountain village; there we run a christian school with 75 students. During Easter of 2019, we highlighted our impact in Haiti through having pictures of students that needed to be sponsored, playing a video of our impact in Haiti, and giving people the opportunity to sponsor some of our Haitian students and family.
By the end of our second worship experience all of our children had been sponsored! We still had one worship experience to go! Many of the families that sponsored our Haitian children were visitors for Easter. They were now connected to our church and our mission for the foreseeable future. People want to be part of a life-changing mission. Use Easter as an opportunity to connect them to yours.
Finally, you need a plan to connect people who visit your church for Easter to a personal spiritual experience through your church and ministry. Church is not just an organization or a service to attend. It should be an encounter with the one true, living God. What is a personal spiritual experience you can connect your Easter visitors to?
Ever wonder what to say when you contact guests after they’ve visited the church? Well, no longer! Download this Done-For-You Follow Up Scripts PDF and you’ll be well on your way to communicating with clarity through text, email, and phone.
It could be a baptism celebration the following Sunday for everyone who received Jesus, or renewed their commitment to Him. You could connect them to a night of worship or prayer. You could connect them to a marriage conference that could spiritually revitalize their marriage. It could be to answer their deepest spiritual questions that are obstacles for their faith.
We have started a sermon series the week after Easter on the four philosophical questions that everyone has. The questions were about our origin, purpose or meaning to life, morality, and eternity; is there more to life than this. We then ended the series with a Sunday where people could text in their questions about life, the Bible, theology, or anything else. By answering their immediate spiritual and biblical questions, we connected many of our Easter visitors to a spiritual experience that advanced their spiritual journey.
What could you do to connect people, who visit your church for Easter, to a spiritual encounter or experience? Remember, the question isn’t if people are willing to come to your church during Easter. The question is how will you connect them to your church in the following days, weeks, and months after Easter. I encourage you to intentionally connect them to your community, your mission, and to a spiritual encounter through your church.
Author: Bobby Gourley, Lead Pastor, Chapel in Florence, AL
Check out these additional blogs on connections:
To Connect People in Your Church, the Path Must Be Clear
Blunder #1 in Assimilating New People
How to Connect with Church Guests
The Perfect Follow-Up Plan for Church Guests
Rethink Easter: From Big Event to Big Impact
4 Action Steps for Guest Follow-Up Strategy from John 4
6 Steps to Get Guests Back After Easter
The Perfect Follow-Up Plan After Easter
Thoughts About Guest Follow-Up
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