From the pages of Outreach magazine and outreachmagazine.com, and from churches around the country, here are 25 spring idea starters to help you reach your community in creative ways.
1. Set a day aside for some spring cleaning in the community.
Contact your local parks organization and find out what needs to be done and where. Then, send teams of volunteers to pick up trash, pull weeds, etc. Build a partnership with your parks—you may want to use them as venues for future events.
2. Landscape local senior-living centers with brightly colored flowers and bushes.
Also, consider enlisting Sunday school children to plant individual flowers (e.g., marigolds and petunias) in cups affixed with Scripture verses, then deliver them to the residents for their windowsills.
3. Care for creation during spring.
Distribute a list to church attendees with suggestions for helping the environment. Include items like replacing all light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, adjusting thermostats, insulating your home and buying energy-efficient products.
4. Ask church members for the names of neighbors who may need help with yardwork.
Such as those who have recently lost a loved one, single moms and families with a parent serving overseas in the military. Send a team of volunteers to ready their house and yard for spring.
5. Bring Easter kindness to your community.
Easter is often more inwardly focused than Christmas and Thanksgiving. Consider marking Easter weekend with a significant act of service, and invite your community to join with your church.
6. Send teams out to offer Easter celebration services to those who can’t come to church.
Like people in nursing homes and jails. Ask permission first, and provide a service complete with music, communion and a Scripture-based message.
7. Thank public servants with Easter lilies.
Instead of spending money on Easter lilies to decorate your church, buy lilies as a donation to local businesses, hospitals, law-enforcement agencies and schools. Attach a small tag from your church: “With appreciation during this Easter season.”
8. Hold a “Resurrection Run” motorcycle rally.
Gather up the bikers in your community. Organize the event a week before Easter, and invite everyone who participates to your Easter services.
9. Offer free Easter portraits.
Set up an Easter-themed backdrop for pictures after the worship service. Give each person a connection card, including a website URL for accessing the photos.
10. Coordinate an Easter egg drop.
One church dropped 18,000 plastic eggs from a helicopter across the local high school’s soccer fields for its neighborhood children.
11. Take Easter to the homeless.
On Easter Sunday, one church closed its doors and set up shop on a downtown street corner, holding a worship-and-communion service for the homeless there. They also grilled burgers and passed them out to the attendees.
12. Deliver Easter eggs to women’s shelters.
Enlist volunteers and kids to decorate dozens of eggs, and then bring them to women and children at a local woman’s shelter.
13. Set up a drive-through passion play.
Stage a free, drive-through drama of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection in your parking lot. Provide motorists with information about your church’s Easter services as they arrive and invite them to park and come inside for refreshments before they leave.