Tag Archives: Easter
Good Friday Reflections
Posted on 23. Apr, 2011 by Kenny.
So, last night I got the privilege of speaking to the 1st-5th graders at our Good Friday service. I actually used the Good Friday lesson of “God to the Rescue.” Great job Dan, Gina and Jonathan! It was a great lesson. I tweaked to make it my own as well as it being a stand-alone message, but it was a lot of fun to teach!
I realized something more this Good Friday than I ever had before. Probably because I’ve never “taught” a Good Friday service or anything, so I’ve probably not been as keenly aware of this before. My observation? Good Friday is the ugly stepchild of Easter. Before anyone takes offense at that statement, let me explain.
Easter is a really big deal, no doubt. It’s the day or savior was raised from the dead. And most years in my life, Good Friday has been more of a second thought. The last two years, I’ve attended Good Friday services that were powerful and contemplative, which has been really good. Although the mood of Good Friday is so often overwhelmingly contemplative and introspective. I think it’s good to mourn the death of Christ and reflect on that ultimate sacrifice. However, I think there’s something else equally important to draw attention to.
When Jesus exclaimed “It is Finished!” and hung his head, the work of redemption was done. The plan that God initiated in the garden thousands of years ago was finally completed. Our sins had been paid for. We see this in the tearing of the veil in the temple. The work was done. Although the word was done at great sacrifice, Jesus had victoriously completed what he had set out to do. It was finished.
I’m not saying that we’re not celebrating something right, I just know that I began to look at things a little differently last night. Truly grateful for my relationship with Jesus, thanks for what he did on that first Good Friday!
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Give-Away: God’s Kids Easter Resource
Posted on 12. Jan, 2011 by Kenny.
Yesterday I blogged about God’s Kids Worship’s “A Big Basket of Easter Songs.”
The kind people at God’s Kids Worship want to give one away… to you. Nice of them, huh? It’s a $29.98 value that you can have by simply retweeting the following message:
Win God’s Kids Worship: Easter Songs resource pack for your #kidmin and get cool & creative Easter ideas. Click here: http://goo.gl/ohZxv
Don’t spam twitter though, only tweet the message one time a day. Leave a comment below as well telling me the most creative thing you’ve done for your kids at Easter.
So, I’ll put your name in the “virtual” hat for every tweet you post (remember, only one per day) as well as one time for every comment you leave (you can post more than one comment, but it has to be a different Easter idea for it to count an additional time). If I like your idea the most, I’ll put your name in the hat 5 more times. I’ll then draw out one name and send that person a copy of the resource. Sounds like fun, huh?
Contest ends on Saturday at 11:59 PM! Ready… Set…. GO!!!!
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Easter Portraits 2.0
Posted on 02. Apr, 2010 by Kenny.
Last year I wrote here about how we killed our Easter Egg hunt. Instead, we brought in volunteer photographers to take family portraits to lure people to specific services. It was the first year we’ve done anything like this and it was very successful. It was a rainy Easter weekend and we look forward to seeing how everything goes on a sunny Easter weekend.
What new and innovative things are you doing this Easter to both draw new families and lure regular attendees to less attended services?
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Huge Giveaway: What do you think?
Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.
A local church (when I say local, I mean another church in Texas) is doing a creative outreach this Easter Sunday. Bay Area Fellowship of Corpus Christi is giving away millions this Easter Sunday. That’s right, millions. Bikes, guitars, TV’s, gift bags and cars. Yeah, I said cars. It’s part of their message this Sunday called the Ultimate Giveaway. Read more about it here.
God did give us a free gift in his son, Jesus. The gift of grace through this amazing sacrifice is the most valuable and priceless gift ever given and it’s worth getting excited about. Bay Area feels that giving away millions of dollars in gifts not only illustrates the example (obviously not to the same degree) of God’s divine giveaway, but also is a high profile lure to get people to come in and check out what’s going on at Bay Area Fellowship this Easter weekend.
I have no doubt that the house will be packed this weekend (expecting between 15,000 to 20,000). I have no doubt that Bay Area Fellowship will grow as a result. I have no doubt that there will be an energy and excitement that will be hard to describe.
What do you think? I know that opinions on something like this vary from one extreme to the other. I ask this becasue Bay Area’s “stunt” has been highly criticized, but this same strategy is followed (not to the same dollar amounts) in children’s ministries everywhere. Prizes are given away on a regular basis to first time visitors, regular attendees or for earning Bible Bucks for bringing friends, bringing Bibles or memorizing scriptures. I hear very little criticism about these techniques as a method to reward kids or lure kids to come to church, but when the same thing is done on an epic scale, people are up in arms.
Is this the same thing? Is it different? Was this a really cool idea or did Bay Area go to far? What do you think?
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Easter Family Portraits
Posted on 16. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Because we didn’t “officially” kill the Easter Egg Hunt until three weeks before Easter, I didn’t have that much time to put together the portrait thing. That’s okay since there wasn’t too much to do.
First, I contacted the photography team. We’ve got a dozen or so professional/semi-professional photographers at Gateway. Whenever we have events, they come out and snap pictures. It helps us have good coverage of an event and it helps them with exposure of their photography business. It took about a week, but I heard back from enough to have 3-5 photographers per service (we only did the portraits immediately following our three lesser attended services).
Second, I advertised the portraits. I didn’t say anything about not having a hunt or that this was replacing the hunt, we just said we’re offering free family portraits after these services to make room for our guests during the other service times. Here’s the actual page from our ministry blog. We also had this announced from the stage for a few weeks, in the program, it was in our leadership emails, and my weekly email to all of our parents.
Third, I worked with one of the photographers to scout out the ideal locations for photographs. We had sunny and rainy locations that didn’t get in the way, but were out in the open where people would see it and want to participate.
Forth, we set up our distribution mechanism. This is my favorite part. You may be wondering, “What an administrative nightmare, now you have to send photos to all these families and match up people with their pictures.” Nope. Welcome SmugMug. On of the photographer (and family friend) helped me set up a Gateway SmugMug account. It would eventually be the photography home for all events at Gateway, but we set this up with Easter photos in mind. I paid for the most expensive account (a few hundred bucks) so that all my photographers could have “assistant rights” and could log in and upload their photos. So, I have three galleries, one for each of the three services we took pictures at. Next week once all the photos are uploaded, we’ll send an email to all the families letting them know where they can go to find their pictures. They can look through the galleries and find their photos. Here is our Easter SmugMug site. The beautiful part about this is that they have options. They can download a high resolution photo themselves or they can actually use SmugMug to order prints of various sizes. Heck, they can even get their photos on mouse pads or coffee mugs. Tomorrow I have an admin typing in the 170 email addresses I collected last Sunday and I’ll send the email out next week. That’s very little admin work for a huge payout.
Last of all, I also had to create sings and release forms. Click here to see see the sign I designed and here to see the photo release. That was it. Yeah, we’re going to do this again.
So, what was the time investment? A few hours to get the photographers which will be easier next year as we’ll already have one year under out belts. What was the cost? About $100 for the signs and printing and a few hundred for SmugMug, all of which was a lot cheaper than the $4000 we would have spent on an Easter Egg Hunt? Oh, and you can get you money back on the SmugMug site. You can control the prices if people choose to order their prints from SmugMug. So, you can raise the price by 5-10% and when people order prints, you can earn money from that as well.
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I killed our Egg Hunt!
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
This year I killed our Ester Egg hunt.
I’m not going to take all the credit for it, my team really didn’t want to do it either. However, it was me who had to sit in the directional team meeting and say, “Oh, we’re not doing the Egg Hunt this year.” The expressions I got were priceless. Silence. Then someone said, “what do you mean we’re not doing an Egg Hunt?”
Let me scoot back a little. Gateway has done an Egg Hunt every Easter for at least five years, maybe more. I was here for my interview last year right after Easter. My Early Childhood Director spent several minutes telling me how things fell apart. It jus wasn’t well planned or well staffed. Go figure, it was between our Easter services (our most volunteer intensive weekend of the year). It has been Gateway’s strategy to offer and egg hunt after the least attended services to motivate people to attend these services, making room for more people during optimal services. It’s not an outreach, but a strategy to manage seats.
Last year when I was planning the budget for 2009 I say $4000 budgeted for the Egg Hunt. Remembering that it wasn’t a great experience, I allocated that $4000 somewhere else. As we got closer to Easter I started thinking about what we could do that would still motivate people to attend the less attended services but wouldn’t involve egg hunts or spending $4000. My great idea was free family portraits. My staff loved the idea (they weren’t responsible for anything). The directional team wasn’t convinced, but the trusted me (a good feeling for sure).
So, Easter came and went. We had about 6-12 kids show up with Easter Egg baskets and I did get one “death stare” from a mom after she heard we weren’t doing a hunt. Other than that, no one said anything. No one. We took hundreds of family portraits and they loved them. Next year it will be even easier to not do an Egg Hunt. We’ll maximize our free portraits opportunity by getting more photographers and promoting better.
So how many volunteers did it take? Eight, if you include the photographers? How much money did it cost? $75 for the signs I had printed (Matt McKee tells me I could do it for a lot less if I had a wide format printer. So, in 2009 I killed our Egg Hunt and it was good.
Tomorrow I’ll give more details on how we did the portraits. It was easier than you’d think.
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Easter Recap
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
I broke my Sabbath rule this week. Yeah, I’m blaming it on Easter. Sara and I have been celebrating an actual 24 hour (at least) sabbath rest every weekend for the last 6 weeks or so. We had Saturday services this Easter, so I headed up to the church at noon to get ready.It was supposed to rain and we were supposed to take family Easter portraits, so I went up early enough to figure out exactly where we would take pictures I also went up early to finish setting up Fellowship One as I had to create new activities and schedules for Easter services.
At 5:00, we had a HUGE crowd, I wasn’t expecting the turnout. We had some lag issues with Fellowship One which caused a little bit of a backup in our check-in lines. However, we had great volunteer coverage and the service went great.
Our 6:30 service was much smaller for kids, but it too went off great.
We took family portraits after both of these services and the families seemed to really enjoy them.
I went home and crashed hard.
About 30 minutes before the 9:00 service began, it started raining… HARD!
I was having issues with three classrooms in Fellowship One and started to panic a little… then it worked itself out.
Attendance for the 9:00 service was light as we expected and this was the service I got to attend.
The sun came out in full glory for the 10:45 service and so did the people. It was pretty packed.
I wasn’t expecting this, but the 12:30 service as also HUGE. I was amazed. We offered family portraits after this service and everyone loved them. Oh, we also had more visitors at 12:30 than any other service.
After the services were over, I took the family to an Easter Egg hunt at a friends house. It was the perfect end to a great weekend!
Easter at Gateway was so much fun. We had over 1100 kids with almost 8,000 in total. In big church, they performed a Rock Opera which included music from U2 and Radiohead. It was an amazing service… powerful and emotional. I still can’t believe I work at a church like this!!!
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Easter Sign final proof
Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Thanks for the feedback on the blog and twitter. Seems like everyone liked. Matt McKee helped me with some design tweeks and I feel it’s a better sign now. Thanks so much Matt! I’ll be taking this out to print in an hour or so. Feel free to critique more if you’d like… I could get it in time.
BTW, this was designed in Illustrator. I’ve been a Photoshop geek for nealry 10 years, but now I’m trying to learn to use Illustrator. I barely know what I’m doing, but I think I like it. Photoshop isn’t the best program for desiging signs or banners… I just needed to make the switch for my larger design jobs.
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Easter Sign
Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Hey, what do you think of my Easter sign? It’s a 30 x 20 inch sign to be displayed on an easel during our Easter services. It will be located where we will be taking free family portraits. I’m having this printed late Friday morning, so let me know what you think ASAP. Is there anything you’d change?
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Predicting Christmas and Easter crowds
Posted on 13. Nov, 2008 by Kenny.
Okay everyone. I need some ideas and suggestions.
This year, we are having five Christmas Eve services. Two on the 23rd and 3 on the 24th. In years past, we’ve had some services fill up more than others, but none of them packed to the gills. We’re providing programming for kids up to Kindergarten.
As a church we’ve been throwing out the idea of ticketing the services. Families will have to pick up tickets before the service to “reserve” space. We will open the doors to the auditorium 30 minutes before the service for people with tickets and it is open seating 15 minutes before the service begins. From what I’ve heard, Gateway has experimented with ticketing before. Some people on my Kids staff have indicated that they planned on more kids than actually showed up. Although that is good, they didn’t feel that the tickets really helped them know how many to plan for.
What do you think? Have you used “ticketing” or something like this before? Are there any things you’ve done to predict the number of kids who will attend? I’ve got my own idea of something I was moving forward with, but I’m not sure I can do it along with ticketing. I hope that some of you who experience massive crowds for Christmas and Easter can throw out a few ideas.
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