JasonCurlee.com

So here’s the set up…on March 21st of 2010 we had 338 in attendance at baf | 5 points.  One week later on March 28th we had 607…a 79.5% increase in seven days.  And to boot it was on a non-holiday weekend.  How did we do it??? Here you go:

• It all started in a meeting with Pastor Bil Cornelius who challenged all of our campus pastors to tie in things we were doing with the weekend.  Knowing I had our big Easter egg hunt coming up I decided to move it into our services on Sunday.  We’re talking about 20,000 Easter eggs.
• Two weeks prior to March 28th, our big day, we began getting flyers into our local schools.  Four school districts allowed us to get our flyers to their elementary and intermediate campuses, about 4,500 flyers in all.
• We added a fourth service to our already three services on that Sunday.  With it being an easter egg hunt we chose to add a 2:30 pm service on top of our normal 10am, 11:30am and 1pm services.
• We did a normal service of music, message and kids areas but made sure it timed out to 58 minutes which we knew would give people time to pick up their children and get out to our hunt area.
• We divided our hunt to four age groups and as soon as all were out at the end of the services we started them.  Since the hunt itself took less than 10 minutes there was adequate time to turnover the services.
• We had a full volunteer crew for each service of people setting out eggs and cooking hot dogs so that our children’s area would not have to do that.   We also had our next service children’s volunteers in their rooms early to handle the next batch coming in.
• Then during the last service I challenged our student director to double his service and offered an incentive…$25 gift certificate to the store of their chose to any teen that got five kids to student service and $100 gift certificate to the one with the most over five….they double as well and had ten first time guests.
• Question you might be thinking…did everyone go into a service? No…and the ones that showed up and didn’t go in did not get counted.  We also had some that showed up early to service time and got into the hunt going and then left…we knew that might happen and didn’t worry about it.  We just didn’t count them.  All that was counted were those serving and in a service.  We know for sure 25 or so people who fit in this category.
• The cool thing is that 15 people prayed to begin a relationship with Christ and six of those were in our student ministry.
• This day was simply awesome and really was simple to put together and required less energy than it would have needed to do this event outside of the services…and since it was in our services more people got to see what our church was about and were able to hear the message of the gospel.
• All of this in a 5,000 sq. foot building with an auditorium that seats 143 and four kids rooms.
• Really and truly…it’s all because we have an awesome team and an AWESOME God!!!!

Oh and that picture above is of Frankie who got to come to our church for the first time and had a blast with his family. This is what church is all about.