Celebrating an Amazing Easter: Now What?

Easter Sunday service — How will you prompt people to return to your church? (Lightstock)

Easter Sunday is always such an amazing day. I hope you had as wonderful of an Easter service as my church, the Journey, did in all of its locations. God truly blessed us with so many gifts.The gifts are the people that walked through our doors for the first time Sunday.

Now we get to show our faithfulness by following up with every first-time gift—I mean, guest.

In this blog, there is not enough room to take you into all that we do at the Journey to follow up with our first-time guests. But I can outline the process to encourage you to take next steps in improving your follow-up.

Here is what we are doing in all of our locations today:

Post-Easter Follow-Up

36-hour email response. By Tuesday, each and every one of our first-time guests should receive an email that 1) thanks them for attending our Easter service and 2) invites them back to our church.
96-hour “snail mail” response. By Thursday afternoon, every guest who provided us with a mailing address receives a personal, handwritten note and a small gift to “wow” them. This will be anything from a Subway card to a Starbucks gift card to a $5 gas card, depending on the location—just something to show God’s love in a practical, unexpected way. We will also include a postcard about the series we kicked off on Easter.
One-month follow-up letter. While the initial goal is to get our Easter guests locked in for the current series, sometimes even people with great intentions simply don’t make it back after Easter. Just because we haven’t heard from them in a month doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in returning. So for these guys, we use the one-month follow-up letter to remind them of their experience with our church, give them a little more information and invite them back one last time.

As you use these tips, be sure to pray for each guest that God has given you.

Nelson Searcy is founding pastor of the Journey Church, with locations across New York City, San Francisco and Boca Raton, Fla. He has trained more than 50,000 church leaders as founder of Church Leader Insights and the Renegade Pastors Network. He is also the author of over 75 church growth resources and 12 books, including the brand-new book, The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life and Ministry. Follow Nelson on Twitter at @nelsonsearcy or read his blog at churchleaderinsights.com/blog.

For the original article, visit churchleaderinsights.com.

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