How do you engage people with the mission of your church?
For most, Sunday mornings are the primary way people gather, encourage, and train our congregation as disciples, but it’s not the only time. Engagement also happens through classes, small groups, men’s breakfasts, women’s teas, mission outreach, and other events the church sponsors. These events form the infrastructure enabling the church to reach members and the community. Simply put, your gospel-driven mission is made visible through events.
What if all events were planned like Sunday mornings?
I am sure that question sent a chill down your spine.. but hear me out. Sunday morning services are the most significant and most carefully planned events in the church calendar. Staff members dedicate their time to organizing, promoting, and ensuring a meaningful worship experience. From marketing and agenda-setting to guest services and logistics, significant effort is invested in making Sundays impactful.
At the same time, we know that a significant amount of our impact occurs through smaller ministry events that serve to disciple the congregation, engage the community, and share the gospel. While we cannot bring the same level of effort, we can bring the same level of intentionality, ensuring the time, energy, space, and funds given are aligned with the church’s disciple-making mission.
Step One: Do you know your “WHY”?
We are going to split this conversation into two parts. When planning events, the first step is understanding the “WHY” for the event or its goals in the overall mission of your church. We will focus on that in this post, while the second part will focus on the mechanics, such as building the team and preparing logistics.
Simon Sinek popularized the concept of asking “WHY.” The simple idea behind his teaching is that the “WHY” drives what you do and how you do it. The same principle applies to our work as pastors. Effective event planning in the church begins with a clear understanding of the goal and vision for the year. Each event should contribute uniquely to the church’s overarching mission.
Most church events fall into three categories:
- Serving the members
- Serving the community
- We have no idea, but we have done this for decades
I know the third category sounds silly, but I bet you have one or two of these events. Perhaps it’s a prayer meeting that no one willingly attends or an outreach event with more volunteers than community members. Events are easy to enshrine in our church culture as people take ownership of them.
Although it is a delicate task, our leadership role is to ensure that all of our resources, efforts, and time are focused on the church’s mission. This requires a strategic planning process that aligns annual goals with calendar planning. A lot is written on strategic planning, much more than can be covered in this article. My purpose is to say that your processes must include strategic planning.
A strategic plan outlines:
- Set goals to reach within a determined time.
- Major actions are needed to accomplish these goals.
Example: A strategic goal may be to increase the number of families in the church by 25%. One key action is to develop two family-focused activities that invite community members to your church.
Strategic planning provides a long-term view of the impact you want to use with the resources at your disposal. This includes your people’s time, the facilities of your church, and finances. This type of planning also has the major advantage of reducing personal preference in the decision-making process.
When conversations get heated, personal preferences can easily dominate, especially when generational differences are involved. Rather than letting the conversation focus on personal styles or perceptions, the committee’s goals serve as the litmus test for evaluating events.
Step Two: Aligning Events with Your “WHY”
Approving an event is not as simple as just finding a free date on the calendar. Every event comes with a cost. This cost may be monetary, but it also includes staff time, volunteer time, church resources, and mental energy that could be utilized elsewhere. Your approval process begins by evaluating whether the total cost (all resources) is justified by the benefits gained from the event.
Your WHY for all events should be evaluated at two spots:
- Annual Planning: Deciding if the event is worth the time and resources based on the annual goals.
- After-Action Review: Review the results of the events in relation to the goals and determine adjustments for the future. (more on this in part 2)
One caveat – Evangelism and Discipleship are hard to measure, and the benefits, such as an increase in attendance, are not always tangled. We must do our best to quantify these measures but also be flexible enough to understand that fruit is always harvested separately from the time it is planted.
Building an Annual Planning Structure:
You likely have a committee or some recognized body within your church that assists with budgeting and annual calendaring. Your first move is to engage this body to work with you to develop annual church goals.
- Work with your staff, boards, or committees to determine church-wide goals for the upcoming year.
- Review your planned events and determine how they move the church toward these goals.
- Align and prioritize your events based on these goals.
This request demonstrates humility in your leadership and fosters alignment within your core team. Once these goals are set, work with this committee and ministry leaders to identify high-level goals for each major event related to its impact on the mission. This may require some hard conversation, but alignment is critical. Once you have developed an agreement on the goals of the event, you are ready to engage event teams and start building out your events, which is the topic of part 2.
Step Three: Move Forward with Grace and Patience
It will take time to change the mentality around events. A wise mix of leadership and patience will help you change how your church thinks about event planning. The first step to intentional event planning is clearly defining the goals and building your event around these objectives.
Every church has what we call sacred cows or events and items that, while not healthy, are very difficult to change. When this occurs around an event, our first instinct may be to ‘rip the bandage off’, but that is rarely the right solution. Especially with a heritage event, there is already support around the event, and it may be better to reinvent this event to honor the past and serve the church’s future.
In working with heritage programs:
- Gather the core supporters of this event to understand its history and purpose.
- Be clear about what you see that is not working with this event. Is it style, purpose, or cultural/demographic shift? What has changed to make this not effective?
- Review the church’s identified core goals and discuss ways this event can be repurposed to meet them.
- Build a new team with a mix of old and new leadership in charge of redesigning the event for the future.
