When developing a church outreach program, your church should first evaluate what it wants to achieve through its program. Is it to demonstrate love to your neighbor, show the community that you exist, or help your congregation meet their “required” community service hours? Developing a solid outreach program in your church can put enormous pressure on the staff and leadership to come up with activities that everyone is interested in and that all will participate in. Many church leaders feel that they are responsible to provide every outreach opportunity possible to their congregation so that their members always have opportunities to love, share, and serve the community. While this is a good objective, what about considering this: Instead of developing an “end-all” outreach program, why not develop a program that can act as a catalyst to encourage and demonstrate to your congregation how to serve and how to get involved. This in turn, can help your church goers get in the habit of recognizing needs in the community and then following up with service, instead of just looking to the church to organize an outreach event or program.
A great example of this being played out is at my local church, Summit in Orlando, Florida. I am a partner of Summit and have been attending for about a year and a half. One reason I was drawn to this church is because of their constant encouragement to be involved in the community and not rely on the church to spread the love of God for you. One of Summit’s outreach programs is an event called niceSERVE. NiceSERVE is a quarterly event that the church organizes that only lasts for one day (actually just four hours). The goal is to “mobilize people to serve locally. This event connects volunteers and local non profits by creating helpful service projects that are geared toward revitalizing neighborhoods and communities.” Four Saturdays a year, over a thousand individuals gather together and are then sent out to twenty or more local non profit organizations. For three or four hours, volunteers engage in activities such as facility clean ups, planting shrubs, sorting food, or playing with children. After, the volunteers come back to the church to eat lunch and then go home.
So what is accomplished in these few hours? Well, initially, there are some benefits to the organization or individual that was served, such as a cleaned yard, encouragement from a stranger, etc.; but that is not the overarching goal of niceSERVE. While initial benefits to the community are great, it is only through constant follow up that an outreach program becomes successful. The goal of niceSERVE is to introduce people to these organizations and individuals in hopes of follow up being completed by the volunteers who participated.
Now something of this magnitude may seem hard for you to pull off. For example, the hours that go into contacting local non profit organizations to discover present needs, organizing project leaders, and gathering supplies are just some of the activities that need to take place before a niceSERVE type event can be accomplished. However, my goal in explaining this project to you is not to have you replicate it, but to understand the premise behind it. Your church’s outreach programs should be the spark, catalyst, or “kick in the rear end” to mobilize and equip your congregation to a discipline of service. So before you organize a parent’s night out, vacation Bible school, or a potluck meal, consider two questions: “How can we improve our community through an outreach program?” and “How can we improve our congregation through an outreach program?”
Be sure to check out our short video on Church Outreach.
