The ultimate responsibility of the church is to preach the gospel and introduce the world to Jesus Christ.
It is because of this reason that churches must come up with outreach ideas as often as possible. Erecting a beautiful edifice where people gather and furnishing it with the best equipment isn’t enough. We must establish a working relationship with the people in our community to attract them to church.
Have you been searching for ways to attract new members to your church? We will introduce you to six church outreach ideas that you can employ to grow your church this year. Let’s get started.
Do This Before Your Church Outreach
Churches and their leaders are different so you must figure out which outreach ideas best suit yours. Don’t just invest energy, time, and donations into an outreach idea without first scrutinizing how it suits your congregation. There are certain things that you should sort out before you organize a church outreach.
- How much do you plan to work with and how will you get the funds?
- Do you need volunteers for the project and how many do you need?
- Will there be publicity for the event? If yes, what digital platforms best suit your publicity?
- How will you follow up with individuals that you meet during your outreach?
- What are plans to document the event for future reference?
Once you can answer these questions, you can begin to look at different church outreach ideas. We have put together six of them in this post to help you out.
Church Outreach Ideas to Grow Your Church
When choosing an outreach idea, you must first consider the assets and weaknesses at your church’s disposal. Doing this helps you figure out which ideas best suit your congregation and reveals where you should make adjustments. Here are some ideas for you to try out:
Participate in Local Fundraisers and Events
Each community has special events and fundraisers that churches can plug into. If you haven’t found any in yours, it’s probably because you haven’t checked. Some of these events include charity runs and walks towards a cause and special health awareness programs.
Why should you participate in such events? One very important reason is that it helps to establish cordial relationships with members of the community. Another reason is that it gives you a chance to meet up with local groups and businesses for better publicity. Most of all, it makes it easy for you to invite them to your church charity events and fundraisers.
Corporate Social Responsibility
How do you contribute to your community asides from preaching the gospel? Corporate social responsibility allows your church to incorporate environmental and social concerns into its operations.
If you are a large church, it is pretty easy to engage in CSR activities like providing free medical and legal services. It isn’t so easy for smaller churches but we have a few ideas. You can serve at a homeless shelter once a week or visit orphanages periodically to serve.
The idea behind successful CSR is to find specific community needs and draw up strategies to meet them. You can make it easier on the church by collecting special offerings and donations towards such causes.
Family Movie Night
If your audio-visual set up at your church is great, you can take advantage of it to show movies periodically. It doesn’t have to be a weekly event, you can make it monthly or quarterly.
You can follow a movie with a discussion of the theme and key characters in the movie. Ask congregants to invite their friends and also invest in publicizing each movie night. Doing this will yield great results in church growth.
Host Concerts
Hosting concerts can be quite sensitive even though music is a language that appeals to so many people. You need to sort out whether you’d be charging an entry fee, taking an offering, or running a free event.
Once you figure this out, you can get your choir to prepare and reach out to local talent to help out. Negotiate what it will cost for such local talent to feature at your concert. If you have a lot of funds at your disposal, then you can reach out to more popular artists to grace your concert.
Special Prayer Meetings
We cannot rule out the importance of prayer in our communities. People need prayer and they seldom ask for it. You can reach out to members of your community by organizing special prayer meetings. Ask them to send in anonymous prayer requests so that you can pray on them during such meetings. You can even make it easier for them to attend by running such meetings online.
Street Evangelism
If your church is in an urban location, you can adopt this. It involves splitting your team into groups and going out to share the gospel and pray for individuals. You’d be amazed at how much results doing this will produce. Don’t forget to draw up a strategy before stepping out.
Conclusion
We have shared some interesting church outreach ideas in this post. Try them out and let us know what you think. Most importantly, make use of ChurchPad to manage each outreach to get the best results.