If you missed last week’s article, here’s the short version: the stretch between Easter and Memorial Day is one of the most underutilized seasons on the church calendar. Your community is already in a celebratory mood, already gathering around Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduations, and weddings, and the churches that grow are the ones that pick one of those moments, lean into it intentionally, and execute it at a level that makes their community take notice. You can read the full conversation here.
This week we’re talking about the how.
Churches Are Better at Events Than They Think
Here’s something I’ve observed over forty years of working with churches of every size and stripe: most churches are actually pretty good at pulling off events. The food gets made, the volunteers show up, the bounce house gets inflated, the kids have a great time. By almost any internal measure, the event was a success.
And then Monday comes, and nothing changed.
No new visitors on Sunday. No new names in the database. No follow-up calls to make because there’s nobody to call. The event happened, the congregation felt good about it, and the community forgot about it by Tuesday morning.
Sound familiar? If it does, the problem almost certainly isn’t your event. It’s what you did, or didn’t do, around it.
There are five elements to an event that actually grows your church. Most churches nail the first one and stumble badly on the rest.
Element One: Execute with Excellence
Your event is a first impression for everyone who walks through the gate. Excellence doesn’t mean expensive. It means intentional. Professional signage. Friendly, trained volunteers who are genuinely glad people showed up. A clean, welcoming environment. An experience that feels like somebody cared enough to think it through.
A mediocre public-facing event doesn’t just fail to help your church’s reputation. It actively hurts it. Your community is making a judgment call about your church every time they interact with you. Make sure that judgment lands in your favor.
Element Two: Market Like You Mean It
This is where a lot of smaller churches get stuck, and honestly, it’s not entirely their fault. Many congregations are still operating on a marketing playbook that’s twenty years out of date. The thinking goes something like this: we’ll put a notice in the bulletin, post a flyer at the laundromat, maybe get a mention in the local paper. And then we’ll wonder why nobody came.
Here’s what actually works in 2026. Social media, particularly Facebook and Nextdoor, which are where your actual neighbors are having actual conversations about your actual community. Professional signs and banners that communicate quality before anyone sets foot on your property. And the pastor being a visible, known, trusted face in the community, not just on Sunday mornings, but at the chamber of commerce, at the school board meeting, at the local coffee shop. You can’t market your way past anonymity. The pastor has to be known.
If you want a comprehensive look at what effective grassroots church marketing actually looks like, every church family should own a copy of my book 101 Things You Can Do to Help Grow Your Church. There are literally 101 ways your membership can get involved in getting the word out, and most of them cost nothing but intentionality. You can find it here.
Element Three: Staff It to Win
You don’t need more volunteers than you have. You need the right volunteers doing the right things. And the first thing every volunteer needs to understand is this: they are not attending this event. They are hosting it.
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Left to their own instincts, a significant number of your church members will show up to a community event and promptly become participants. They’ll get in line for the food. They’ll watch the kids’ games. They’ll cluster together with their friends from the third pew and have a wonderful time catching up. And the community visitors who came hoping to connect with somebody will leave having connected with nobody.
Every church member at your event is staff. Full stop. Their job is not to enjoy the bounce house. Their job is to be so genuinely warm, so actively engaged with the strangers around them, that those strangers leave feeling like they already know somebody at this church. If a member feels the need to attend the event as a participant rather than a host, kindly point them toward the similar event the church down the street is probably running that same weekend.
Brief your people before the event. Tell them exactly what their role is. Tell them their goal is to have at least three meaningful conversations with people they’ve never met. Tell them to listen more than they talk, to ask questions, to be curious about the people in front of them. The cotton candy machine is just the excuse to start the conversation. The conversation is the whole point.
Element Four: Get the Contact Information
Here’s where most churches leave the real value sitting on the table.
A few years ago I worked with a church in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Connection Church runs an annual Fourth of July community event, and it draws a crowd. Before we started working together, they were doing the event well: people came, had a great time, and went home. The church had no idea who had been there or how to reach them.
After we worked through their strategy together, they made one key change: they set up a registration table with a door prize, an iPad, and made a genuine celebration out of the drawing. People signed up enthusiastically. That year they collected contact information from over 600 households.
Six hundred households who had now voluntarily connected with the church.
That number should stop you cold for a moment. Because here’s what it means: those aren’t strangers anymore. They raised their hand. They said, in effect, we’re willing to have a relationship with you. What you do next is everything.
Element Five: Follow Up Like You Mean It
Connection Church’s pastor understood what that list represented. So he did something most pastors talk about and few actually execute: he followed up systematically, personally, and persistently.
His team sent handwritten notes to all 600 households. He wrote the copy. They sent weekly emails introducing upcoming needs-based sermon series, the kind of topics that make an unchurched person think, that actually sounds relevant to my life. They sent Easter cards and Christmas cards, handwritten, with personal invitations to upcoming events. They stayed in contact digitally and through the mail, consistently, without apology, because they understood that most people need multiple meaningful touches before they take a step toward a church.
In the first year following that event, Connection Church baptized 33 people who had come to faith through that follow-up process.
Thirty-three.
And they didn’t stop. They kept the relationship alive with those original 600 households. A couple of months ago, three years after that Fourth of July event, one of those original registrants walked through the doors of Connection Church for the first time, connected with the congregation, and is now an active member.
That’s not a marketing story. That’s a discipleship story that started with an iPad and a registration table.
It’s worth noting that Connection Church learned and refined this process, along with many others, through their involvement in the Growing Church Network. If you want to know more about what that kind of ongoing coaching and community looks like for your church, you can find the details here.
So Here’s Your Checklist
Five elements. One event. All five matter.
Plan it excellently. Market it aggressively and intelligently. Staff it with intentional hosts. Capture every contact. Follow up persistently and personally.
Most churches do the first one reasonably well. The ones that grow are the ones that do all five.
The follow-up piece of this is so important that we’ve put together a dedicated resource on exactly how to do it well. It’s called First Step Follow-Up, and while it was originally designed around first-time Sunday visitors, every principle in it applies directly to event follow-up as well. Connection Church’s pastor would recognize every page of it.
You can download it free here.
Next week we’re going to talk about one specific kind of event that a surprising number of smaller churches are sitting on without realizing it: wedding ministry. Whether it’s right for your church, what it actually takes to do it well, and why a picturesque sanctuary might be one of your most underutilized outreach assets. That conversation is worth your time.