It’s the day after Easter and yesterday was glorious. Or maybe it wasn’t.
Either way, today’s a new day and honestly, the calendar doesn’t care about your feelings.
If Easter exceeded your expectations, that’s worth a moment of gratitude and a quiet pat on the back. Good leadership showed up, and it made a difference. Now put that energy somewhere useful.
If Easter left you a little deflated, take the rest of today. Lick your wounds, talk to your spouse, eat the leftover candy. Tomorrow’s coming, so take the rest of today to bask in disappointment. Then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and turn your face forward to the rest of the year. Easter’s in the books, but there are fields that need harvesting. Let’s get busy.
But speaking of moving forward, here’s a note for your future self, especially if this Easter wasn’t all you’d hoped: Set a calendar reminder for February 16-18 of next year to attend the Easter Momentum Challenge with me. Don’t wait to put it on your calendar next week. Pencil it in now: February 16-18. That’s where Easter momentum gets built, not the week before Palm Sunday. We’ll leave that conversation there.
Right now, there’s a more pressing opportunity sitting right in front of you.
The Season Nobody’s Paying Attention To
Between now and Memorial Day, your community is going to celebrate. A lot.
Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. Graduations. Weddings. And then Memorial Day weekend, which is essentially our culture’s starting pistol for summer. These aren’t random dates on a secular calendar. They’re open doors, and the question isn’t whether your church should walk through one of them. The question is which one, and how.
Most small and mid-sized churches make the same mistake every spring. They try to walk through all of them. A Mother’s Day brunch, a graduation Sunday, a community Memorial Day cookout, maybe a baccalaureate service for good measure. The calendar fills up, the volunteers burn out, and every event lands with a thud because nobody had enough gas left to do any of them well.
Here’s the thing about excellence: your community notices it. They notice when an event feels pulled together and genuinely welcoming. They also notice when it feels like a potluck that nobody really planned. A mediocre public-facing event doesn’t just fail to help your church’s reputation. It actively hurts it.
The old saying is true, even if it’s been misattributed to everyone from St. Francis to Benjamin Franklin: Do few things, but do them well.” For a church running on a volunteer base of twenty or forty people, that’s not a philosophy. That’s survival.
So Pull Out the Calendar
Here’s your actual first step. Not a prayer meeting about it. Not a staff retreat. Pull out the calendar and make some decisions.
You’ve already got Easter in the books. You’ve already got Christmas penciled in for December. Depending on your church’s size and energy, you probably have room for one, maybe two, major outreach-focused events between now and Labor Day. Pick them intentionally or the calendar will pick them for you, and it won’t pick well.
So what are your options?
Mother’s Day
It’s still a pull, but be honest about what it is in 2026. The old cultural aphorism, that Mom decides where the family goes to church and the kids decide whether they come back, has mostly disintegrated. Mother’s Day still draws families together, and that creates genuine opportunity. But it works best for churches whose community includes young families or women who carry significant influence in their households. If that’s your target, this is worth your energy.
Father’s Day
Counterintuitive for a lot of churches, but potentially powerful. Men are notoriously harder to get through the door, and yes, Father’s Day competes with fishing trips and baseball games. But men are also carrying real questions right now, about purpose, about family, about what they’re supposed to be. A church that speaks directly to those questions with a compelling Sunday experience, or better yet a well-designed event the week before, can cut through. The key word is compelling. Generic won’t work here.
Graduations and Baccalaureate
Let’s me be direct. Really direct: The baccalaureate boat has sailed. In most communities it’s been torpedoed, is taking on water, and is going down fast. If your church has graduates and your community still does a meaningful service, fine, go, support your people. But if you’re considering investing significant time and energy into organizing or hosting or even participating in one because you think it’ll reach new people, ask yourself one honest question first: Has it ever actually brought anyone new through your doors? In over forty years of working with churches, I’ve never once heard a pastor say yes to that question. Save your volunteers and your energy for something that might possibly actually make a disciple.
Weddings
This one’s different, and it deserves more than a paragraph. So I’ll give it just enough to whet your appetite.
Some churches have turned their wedding season into something far bigger than an event. It becomes a ministry, a genuine front door for young couples who end up staying, getting discipled, raising their kids, and bringing their friends. Peachtree Christian Church in Atlanta did exactly that. Pastor Jim Collins leveraged a beautiful sanctuary and an intentional process, premarital counseling, community engagement, members who actually built relationships, and turned wedding after wedding into a discipleship pipeline for young adults. It worked remarkably well.
A lot of smaller churches have sanctuaries that are genuinely picturesque. They rent them out for a few hundred dollars and call it a budget line. That’s a missed opportunity on a significant scale. But doing it right takes real infrastructure and intentional strategy. That’s a longer conversation, and it’s one worth having. We’ll come back to it in two weeks … you can hold me to it!
The Decision Underneath All the Decisions
Here’s what I want you to notice about the above. Every choice I’ve just described, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, weddings or graduations, this event or that one, every single fork in the road leads back to the same fundamental question.
Who are you trying to reach?
You can’t choose the right event without answering that first. You can’t design something compelling for “everyone.” Everyone is no one. The churches that do this well know exactly who they’re aiming at. They’ve thought carefully about who lives in their community, what those people care about, what questions they’re carrying, and what would genuinely draw them in.
If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience, you’re essentially planning a party and hoping the right people show up.
That’s exactly what we’re digging into in the next Catalytic Conversation. We’re going to walk through how to define your church’s ideal target audience, your outreach avatar, so that decisions like the ones in this article get a whole lot clearer.
Spring is short. The window between Easter and Memorial Day closes faster than you think. Make the decisions now, while the momentum from yesterday still has some heat in it.
P.S. More Coming Next Monday … and the Monday After That
We’re just getting started.
Next week we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of actually pulling off a spring event that moves the needle. Choosing the right event is one thing. Staffing it, marketing it, and executing it at a level that makes your community take notice is another conversation entirely. That’s part two.
And the week after that, we’re going to tackle something most pastors either overlook completely or badly underestimate: Wedding ministry. Specifically, whether it’s right for your church, and what it actually takes to transform your sanctuary from a rental venue into a genuine front door for young couples. You might be surprised what’s possible.
Stay with me. This is worth your next three Mondays.