Thanksgiving is the perfect time of the year to practice gratitude. Usually, the holiday is associated with turkey, pies, cranberry sauce, and some holiday football. But at its deepest essence, it is foremost connected to gratitude. As Christians, we are thankful to Christ and God for all the blessings given to us. We pray and express our appreciation.
As a church, this is an excellent time to attract more members and grow. To do so, there are a number of things you can do. From gratitude boards, flyers, and special Thanksgiving service, to email marketing. Here is how you can make the best of Thanksgiving for your church.
Thanksgiving Flyers
There are a variety of activities you can do inside and outside the church at this time. For example, you can hold a special service on the weekend before and after Thanksgiving, or you can hold some community events highlighting the spirit of gratitude. But these will only be successful if people know about them. Which is why you will be using flyers to inform the public. You can make them easily with PosterMyWall’s flyer maker. It is easy to use and you can create a flyer in mere minutes. You will also have access to the various church flyer templates to give you a headstart.
Templates make short work of designing pretty much anything you’d require. In this case, you will get a basic structure in the template that you can then modify according to your needs. They also help you when you need something on short notice. You can take a template, quickly tweak it with your information, and then send it for printing.
In the example below, the designer has given the important information in big and bold text. It highlights what the flyer is about, where the prayer night is being held, and when. They then added some accompanying imagery as well which shows a man praying before the cross. Something similar can work for your Thanksgiving campaign by altering such a template with the appropriate information.
Gratitude Board
Every church has a notice board where important notices and announcements are put up periodically, and chances are that you have one too. Keeping up with the Thanksgiving spirit, convert yours to a Gratitude Board. Invite your members to put up messages thanking God for things in their lives.
This is a low-cost and inclusive activity that you can easily do. Once a few messages are put up, others will join in and soon your board will be filled with messages. You can also share scriptures as well to further encourage your members to share.
Gift Bags
Gratitude is best celebrated when it is spread around. Have your members get together and assemble gift bags that they will then later distribute in the community. These can have items related to Thanksgiving. Such as canned food that one can use in their Thanksgiving dinner, some sweets, and a flyer inviting recipients to your church.
Doing this will demonstrate the spirit of gratitude and giving and shows the hospitality of your church. This will inspire more people from your community to become members of your church thus growing it. You will also be helping the less privileged segments of society as well, particularly those who can’t celebrate the holiday.
Special Prayers And Service
One of the best ways to celebrate Thanksgiving is to get together and thank God for all that He has done in our lives. As such, you can hold special prayers and service at your church where you offer special prayers and gratitude to the Almighty. These are best done before or after Thanksgiving since everyone will be with their families on Thanksgiving day.
You may also invite your members to come up and share their testimonies. They can share how they received the grace of God by giving more in their lives or how the Lord bestowed His goodness upon them and their families this year. This is a great way to include everyone in the spirit of gratitude compared to just a sermon.
Letter Writing Campaigns
Thanksgiving day is a great time to bring your members together and hold a letter-writing campaign. You all will be writing letters to people who don’t have others with them at this time or simply who may need support. People such as the elderly, those in the hospital, or even family members.
Let the thanks flow into written words and express your gratitude to others in the community. Hand-written letters are an intimate way to contact each other. Such a letter feels earnest and intentional and has a greater impact on the person who receives them. We never know what challenges someone is going through at a time. So letters like these are a great way to express support to them and remind them of God’s light and grace.
Send Personal Invitations Over Email
Your members are more likely to engage with you and the church when they feel like they are being personally invited. For Thanksgiving, you likely have a host of activities planned for which you want your members to join. For example, the strategies mentioned above require the participation of the church members. In order to bring them over, you will write your personalized invitation and send them to your members over email. To help, you can use PosterMyWall’s church email templates.
These templates have a basic email structure that can help in making your email. You can also add some graphical elements such as pictures, clip art, etc. Since the templates will already have space for these elements, you can add them easily and efficiently. You can design several emails at a time and prime them up to send them en masse to your email list. You can easily collect the email addresses of your members when they come to attend service.
In the example below, we have a design that you can modify to invite your members for a special Thanksgiving prayer service. The designer has used an image to represent the message visually which the recipient will get before they even read a single word. This increases information retention and engagement with your email. You can modify this, some other template, or make a design yourself from scratch to suit your needs.
Thanksgiving is the perfect time of the year to remind people of God’s grace and be thankful for it. There are many things you can do for this purpose, some of which have been covered above. You will likely have to do them all for maximum effectiveness. The main idea behind them is to remind people to be thankful for the blessings in their lives. And the best place to do so is at your church. The strategies above will put your church in the public eye and bring more people to join as members. More members mean more people can join in the Thanksgiving activities next year. As long as your activities spread the message of gratitude and inspire people to engage with your church, your campaign will be successful.
