Easter Block Parties

The Rock (Round Rock)-   Now that we’ve caught our breath, we can take a moment to look back at our Easter events and see what worked and what didn’t.

At The Rock, we tried a little something different this year. Last year’s Easter Egg Hunt was a success seeing as how we had over 150 people show up to our event and it was below freezing with snow and ice on the ground. But sadly, our focus lately has been inward. Thus, we needed to figure out how to get our people back in outreach mode. In an effort to challenge our people to reach out to the neighborhoods where we live, we attempted 3 separate Block Parties/Easter Events.

The concept was simple enough. We put 3 teams together. Each team consisted of our people that lived in and around the same neighborhood. We had a Northwest Round Rock team, a Northeast Round Rock team and a Southeast Round Rock team. Each team has one person who was “in charge”. Each team was responsible for planning their Block Party. From activity booths to advertising, each team took care of their own event. The block party took place on Saturday (the day before Easter).

The goal was to have each team minister to their neighborhood. There was no mass mail outs, newspaper ads, and no radio or tv spots. It was strictly a neighborhood wide invitation. People were invited through door hangers, word of mouth (personal invitation), church newsletter, posters (hung in neighborhood businesses) and neighborhood association newsletters.

The “payoff” was far greater than we had imagined. Each block party had over 100 people show up (one had over 200), and church was full on Easter Sunday (we used the block parties to invite people to church on Easter). The block parties also lit a fire under our outreach burner. People are wanting to know what our next Block Party/Outreach event will be. In other words…the people are on fire. And, the ownership that was created by having the teams plan and implement their own event was priceless. We also gave people in our communities a chance to know us better and we gained more name recognition.

The Links To The Right –>

Mitch (The Rock)-   There are tons of Church Planter websites out there that want to charge you an arm and a leg for their resources. Sad thing is, most Church Planters don’t have a lot of money to spend on message illustrations, media packages, sermon transcripts and PowerPoint presentations. And if we do have money enough to purchase these resources, that money could probably be better spent somewhere else (can you say outreach).

Geared4Church wants to do all we can to get the best resources into your hands for the best price…free. The links to the right will take you to websites that offer awesome message series, media tools such as message illustration videos, background loops, intro (segue) videos, message outlines and much more all for free.

Blue Letter Bible is a great website that can assist you in message preparation. It has a lot of the same features as Logos and can be a valuable tool for researching your next message series.

If you have any other websites that exist to help pastors, not profit from them, let us know.

Videos To The Right –>

Mitch (The Rock)- The videos to the right, labeled message illustration videos, are ones we have used or will use at The Rock as illustration videos. Media is such an important tool for churches and church plants especially.

If your church has a powerpoint, adding illustrations to your message is a great way to better present the topic and/or scripture you teaching on. It also gives the people hearing your message something they can use to associate the teaching with which they can use to later recall the teaching and the application.

Having a loop playing in the background (that relates to your message) while you teach is another way to help the listener better associate and remember the point of the message. It also adds an element of “high techness” to your Sunday mornings. In an age where technology rules, it doesn’t hurt to have a high tech look and feel if the people you are trying to reach live in a high tech world.

We will add more illustration videos as we find them. If you know of any videos let us know…we’ll add them.

*Now as far as copyright issues go, the movie and t.v. clips we show are ones we get off of YouTube.com and similar sites. These sites are showing the clips to the public at no charge and our church is showing the same clips to the public for no charge (in other words, we’re not charging anyone to view the clips).

Geared4Church

The Rock (Round Rock)-   Geared4Church is a ministry of The Rock Church of Williamson County (Round Rock, TX). This blog was created so that church planters could bounce ideas off of one another in an effort to find “out of the box” ways of taking the gospel to those who need to hear it (our target groups). If you have any ideas that might help assist pastors in creating new and inventive ways of engaging their churches to spread the good news of Jesus Christ, feel free to add a post.