Easter is coming! Each Easter season, the main goal of the global church is to preach the Gospel story of Jesus Christ and share his resurrection power. While we can all agree this is the most important goal of the church, secondary to this would be to invite those who are not currently following Jesus to come to church. But what are the most effective ways for you to invite others to your church? Whether you are wanting big ideas or small, we’ve got a list of the top church invitation ideas for Easter!
Whether you consider yourself experienced or not, as you go through this list of ideas on how to invite your community to your Easter service, you will find yourself coming up with your own ideas or find a way to tailor these ideas to fit your church and community. Some of these ideas may require more prep time and a larger budget, where others are simple and can be done in an afternoon.
While it may seem like a strange concept, churches in the 21st century are starting to become pros at marketing. Why? There is so much going on in the world that is fighting for our attention. Between work, family life, hobbies, school, special events and just normal everyday life, it can be hard to encourage others to come to church; especially those who didn’t grow up attending church or haven’t stepped foot in a church for years. Marketing your church to them helps bring your church to the forefront of their mind and creates excitement around your church and what you have to offer. If you do it well, marketing your church can also make guests feel more welcome, even before they’ve attended. Seeing highlight videos of your church events or photos of what your services are like on social media can help those who want to attend your church feel more comfortable as they know what to expect and may even recognize faces. With that said, let’s dive in and take a look at these church invitation ideas for Easter.
Church Invitation Ideas For Easter: How To Invite Your Community
Prayer
First and foremost, pray! Spending time in prayer is the most important aspect of your ministry. Pray that your efforts would be multiplied and that your resources would be spent well and that, as you start to promote and invite others to your Easter services, the right individuals would see the invitation and respond.
Lawn Signs
A fun way of including your congregation in promoting and inviting others to attend your church is with custom-made lawn signs! You can make up quite a few of them and hand them out to members of your congregation so they can plant them in their front yards, inviting others to church. Make sure the design sticks out, looks nice and has the right info about your church. You can even step it up a notch and put how many miles away the church is. You could easily do this by getting a map of your city/town and finding out who lives where and creating a radius. For instance, if you have a dozen people that live within a mile, create signs that have that on there. You’ll be surprised at how this extra little touch will encourage more to come check out your church.
Door Hangers
This one might seem a little out of date or “spammy” to some, but bear with us, there was a reason why these used to be such a big thing. Create some custom door hangers and go door-to-door around the neighborhoods closest to your church. Now, this doesn’t have to be a thing where you knock on each door and chat with them, but you’ll find that the personal approach of doing this act will encourage those in your community to come check out your church. Just be sure not to break any laws and respect any “No Solicitation” signs, when applicable.
Free Car Wash
Think about hosting a free car wash a week or two leading up. Not only is this a great way to bless your community, but you can use this as a way to invite those getting their car washed to attend your church, afterward. Host the car wash on your church campus if you’re located in the city around a lot of traffic. If not, partner with a local grocery store or business with a parking lot that can facilitate your needs. Aside from just washing cars, you can also help people load their cars and pass out flyers inviting them to join you for your Easter service. Of course, some areas may still have weather that’s too cold to do an outdoor car wash, but this can give you some ideas on making your ministry visible to the public.
Free Drinks
Similar to the free car wash, bless your community with free drinks! You can go as big and broad with this as you want or you can keep it simple. You can stand out by a street corner on a hot day with water bottles that have custom labels printed on them with your church information. Or you can go to a local park and pass out water bottles, coffee, hot chocolate and other goodies, all with your church’s info attached to it. This is another great way of blessing those around you.
Invitation Cards + Eggs
Create invitation cards with all the information about your Easter services and contact information. Have these available for your congregation to take a few home and pray about who they should hand them out to. For your kids, you can create Easter invite eggs. Get a bunch of those hollow plastic eggs and put a piece of candy with a little invitation folded up inside each one. This is a fun way to have the kids in your church invite their friends to Easter Sunday.
Email Invitations/Newsletter
Does your church have an email list? How about a monthly newsletter? Use these resources as a way to inform your email subscribers about your upcoming Easter services and to encourage them to invite their friends and family. Consider creating a series of emails leading up to Easter that includes any information they need to share with potential visitors they want to invite.
Yard Sale/Spring Cleaning
Clean up your campus, dig through your storage closets and ask your congregation to gather things they would be willing to donate to the church and host a big yard sale! You can start promoting your yard sale in the local paper, Facebook, Twitter and any other platforms or avenues. Then, during your yard sale, you can promote your Easter services and encourage those who are shopping to come back and attend your Easter service. This is another great way for people to meet some of your church members and see your church campus before attending.
Local Media
Another great way of inviting your community is through your local radio stations, news channels and newspaper. Depending on the outlet, you may even get free advertising. This is just another great way of reaching out to those who may not know about your church.
Billboards
This idea is a bit bigger than some of the others on this list (pun intended). While this may take a little more funding and planning than the other ideas on this list, this one can have a major impact! Just think of how cool it would be to see your church on a billboard in your city/town? This is still a great way to advertise and promote. And now, more and more cities are using digital billboards. Try partnering with a local business owner and ask them to sponsor your billboard or maybe even share it for the time being. Or better yet, contact the local billboard company and see if they would be willing to donate the space for the Easter season. You’d be amazed at what you can get by simply asking.
Flyers
Flyers are still a great option for spreading the news about events. Get a bunch of flyers printed out and go around your town posting them at coffee shops, grocery stores, libraries, community centers, telephone poles, gyms, etc. Posting flyers everywhere will ensure you are reaching people everywhere and more than once. Print out extras and ask your congregation to partake in this as they can hand them out to co-workers, friends and family.
Social Media
Word of mouth is still one of the best forms of communication and social media is no exception. Start spreading the word on all of your social media platforms. Create a Facebook event and start inviting your congregation and ask them to invite others to the event. Use Instagram Geotag with hashtags for your city in the weeks leading up to Easter. Consistency is key with social media, if you are going to post once a day, or 4 times a week, then do it and stick with it. Keep your branding uniform across all platforms, ensure your logo is on every image and that your messaging is also the same. It’s also a good idea to have someone else in the church proofread your work to make sure you don’t post anything with typos or incorrect information. Try doing some boosted Facebook posts and promote your Easter service. You don’t need a lot of money to do this and can be very strategic with $50-$100 and reach more people that like your church’s Facebook page, besides just the typical organic reach you get with normal posts. This is another great way to reach your community and direct traffic to your church website or Facebook timeline. Keep in mind that there are rules that apply to churches posting photos of church members on social media or your church website. You can find out more information on using social media for a church, here.
Shareable Content
In the line of social media, create some shareable images for your congregation to use on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It can be very similar to the main images you use for your social media. Each shareable image should contain your logo and service time. You can get creative and use a wide variety of church graphics or you can use photos of your church services and worship with a nice color overlay and your logo. Using a church graphics editor to create these images will save you a lot of time and make your job easier.
Google My Business
Take time before you start promoting Easter services to check and make sure that Google and other search engines have the right information about your church. Google My Business and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are big factors to consider as you look to increase church attendance on Easter. You would be shocked how many churches aren’t even aware of this free service by Google. This allows you to list your location, phone number, office hours, service times, website, photos and more. You can even update your hours for special events, such as Easter. If your church has moved recently and Google still has the incorrect address, make sure to update it immediately. You can learn more about Google My Business for churches, here.
Church Website
One of the absolute and most important items on this list is your church website. Why? All of the above items are promoting your church and your Easter services, but you need an outlet that you can direct them to where they can get more information. Potential visitors will Google your church, meaning that having an up-to-date church website is very important. Every church website is bound to see an increase in traffic during the Easter season and you can help control how much traffic yours gets. If your website is outdated, has slow load times or isn’t optimized for SEO, Google and other search engines will put you lower on the list, keeping you off of the first pages when people search for churches in your area. This is especially important if your church name is similar to others nearby. If someone receives an invitation to your church and it’s named First Baptist Church, you’ll want to try and help your church website rank higher than any other First Baptist Church in your area on Google and that your information is updated and current. Your church website is also a great reflection of who you are as a church, what you believe in and what to expect. There are countless stories of people who were looking for churches to attend and started browsing their websites, only to find pictures from the potluck from 5 years ago, still on the homepage. With some church websites, it’s hard to even tell if they still meet as a church, due to how outdated the website is. With that said, you have the opportunity to make this year different. With the right church website builder, you can easily create the church website you’ve always dreamed of.
Don’t have time to build a new website before Easter? No worries. You can sign up for a free website migration and our team of experts will move all of your current information from your old, outdated church website over to a brand new Sharefaith church website, we’ll even help you transfer your domain name. When finished, you’ll have a professional church website that is easy to use, up-to-date and will wow your church members and visitors. Signing up for a website migration is easy: simply sign up for Sharefaith Complete, fill out the migration form, select from one of our professionally created church website templates, and our team will do the rest! Learn more about Sharefaith’s Church Website Migration here or give us a call at 888-317-4018.
As you can see, all of these church invitation ideas for Easter, they all go hand in hand. With any church marketing or outreach, it is best to have a unified approach and keep things consistent. Your outreach will be most effective this Easter season if you do multiple items from this list. The end goal would be that people would hear a radio ad, see a billboard, a flyer, a lawn sign, highlight on the local news, social media and then end up attending your service with their family and, ultimately, grow closer to our Lord, King & Savior, Jesus Christ!