Ideas 4 Church Planters
Hey – I’m assuming that some who are reading this are future church planters. We launched 2 new campuses this week, so I thought I’d share some of what we did to try and make it a “successful” launch. Hopefully you’ll be able to steal some of these ideas (in fact, we stole many of them ourselves). So here’s a random list of some of what we did:
1. Had our Launch Team(s) meet once, then twice a month. In these meetings we did vision casting, praying, strategizing, honoring, etc.
2. We did several absolutely free car washes in the community. We accepted no donations. We gave each person a free bottle of water with a Forefront label, and a free frisbee that said “Forefront is coming!”
3. We did donut dropoffs. People on the Launch Team chose businesses, and hospital emergency rooms, and schools – and then once a week (or more) dropped off one or two dozen donuts to the employees of that place, with a “Forefront is coming!” sticker on the box. Some people did this with pizza’s instead of donuts.
4. We did a bunch of block parties, where we had our Launch Team invite all their neighbors over for a party. Some set up screens and borrowed our projector and showed a movie at night for families. At these block parties some just discreetly tried to have conversations about the new campus. Others made short announcements that they were a part of a new church startup and to see them if you had questions.
5. We handed out water bottles all over the place. We had Forefront labels on them.
6. We sent a series of 3 postcards to 57,000 homes in the vicinity of our new Sunday morning campus. (These cards did NOT land on the days they were supposed to. That really stunk.)
7. We did radio ads on four secular rock stations and ESPN radio for the week before launch, and the week after launch. The ad played about 5 or 6 times per station, per day. (So about 1,000 ads over two weeks.)
8. We had our people put about 15,000 doorhangers on the homes around the vicinity of our Tuesday night campus.
9. We did 240 days of prayer, where each day we had at least one person who “owned” praying for the launch(es) for that day. This person committed to spend as much time as possible praying (fervantly) for the launch(es).
10. We followed those 240 days with 240 hours of prayer, where we had at least one person praying every minute for 10 straight days. We had calendars where people signed up for round-the-clock praying. (Got this idea from Acts 1-2, sort of via Mark Batterson, where the Christians pray “constantly” from Passover-ish to Pentecost (10 days) and then … Pentecost happens.)
11. We had lots of people fast for the new campus(es), some for up to ten days.
We did more stuff, but that’s most of it (and all I can think of right now).