How To Run Great Church Events

Community is one of the core tenets of Christianity, but many churches don’t know how to reach out and nurture their local community. 

Running events is a great way to attract people to your church, without the pressure of a normal weekly service. 

By introducing people to your church without the direct burden of committing to faith, events can build your congregation in a natural and stress-free way. This can remove barriers to people returning to your church from the first visit.

At Chmeetings, we believe that every church should be empowered to connect with their community in a simple and hassle-free way. 

That’s why we want to lend a hand in helping you bring together your church and its surrounding community in new and exciting ways. 

In this article, we’ll explore some simple ways to plan and organize some great events to help enrich your church’s schedule!     

Why Should Your Church Run Events?

A church is often a pillar of its local community. Connecting with your local community is incredibly important – not only to unify the people around you but teach followers how togetherness can help enrich their lives.

Many churches struggle to get people interested and involved in their events – and often try to push normal services to a crowd that doesn’t have an incentive to listen.

A non-service event can help newcomers become more familiar with your church community. And your community can foster these relationships to become long-lasting.

On another note, events can also act as fundraisers for the church. They can help you raise the necessary cash to continue operations. 

What Types Of Church Events Can You Run?

There are many different types of events you can run to bring different groups of people to your church. 

Live Music Events

Music enriches the soul. That’s why giving people around you a platform to express themselves through music is a great way to get people involved with your church. 

What’s even better is that churches are uniquely equipped to support live music. The PA audio systems commonly used for prayer can be applied to a live music setting, and the front of the church can be used as a stage.

Here are some live music events that your church can run to get people involved!

Open Mics

An open mic is a great way of getting young adults involved locally. By hosting a non-religious open mic, people who are usually turned off by the pressure of practicing faith will be more incentivised to come along to watch and perform. 

This means that they can get to know the local congregation better, and can feel less pressure when starting to explore their faith more.  

Las Vegas’s Life Baptist Church regularly holds acoustic open mic nights to allow local musicians and songwriters to showcase their talents!

Concerts

A great way to build ties with your wider community is to have some musicians come in to perform concerts in your church.  You’ll bring people to your church to support an artist, and you can then help them feel more comfortable taking their first step into participating in more Christian-centered events.

‘Learn Music’ Days

Music is fun to learn! By providing an opportunity for young children to spend time at church learning how to play music, you can help them have fun and grow. This also helps less fortunate kids get into music, by being able to access instruments and education that would usually be too expensive.

Food Gatherings

Food brings joy to everyone. That’s why food gatherings can help your congregation truly bond and grow together.

Food festivals

Food festivals allow people to make the food that they enjoy and also discover different cuisines. For instance, St. Anthony Maronite Catholic Church organizes an annual Lebanese food festival, and it’s one of the biggest in the region. In Christianity, food is intrinsically tied to community, and a food festival is a great way to showcase this.

Soup Kitchens

Churches regularly host soup kitchens for rough sleepers during weekday lunchtime. Some churches only do this during the holiday season or Easter.

Hosting these all year round is a great way of getting people to volunteer for your church and help those in need.

People who regularly attend will tend to volunteer, and people from outside of your church may come along to help too.

The Church of the Holy Apostles hasn’t missed a soup kitchen in well over 30 years – even during the pandemic. Their soup kitchen in the heart of New York City is the largest and most consistent in the city. They meet every weekday to serve lunch to whoever needs it!

Speaking about keeping the kitchen open during the Pandemic, the Church’s rector told The New York Times:

“This is a great place. As other soup kitchens have closed, Holy Apostles is the last light still on. Without us, a lot of our guests would probably fall by the wayside. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Meal Drives: Similar to Soup Kitchens, you can host meal drives to get people to help the less fortunate by making food to hand out and deliver to them. This will give people another reason to just get involved with a good cause, whilst also bringing more positive attention to the church!

While other events can help your community grow, making, sharing and eating food is a great way to get people bonded. A meal out is already a great way of socializing, but events like potlucks and meal drives can really help provide a more warm and personal experience for those attending.

Church Fair

A church fair can be great to get children and families involved. By hosting these during weekends and vacations, you can help provide more extracurricular activities to schoolchildren.

Children can run arts and crafts stalls, and spend time having fun and being creative. This will help them feel more comfortable getting involved with the church and can help spark or strengthen a connection with their faith.  You can even team up with local schools to organize and advertise fairs, so you can even get more people attending!

The St David’s Church Fair run by the St David’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, PA is widely considered to be the longest continuously running church fair in the US.

The annual fair is now in its 171th year – and each year for nearly two centuries, the St David’s Church has offered its local community plenty of activities, stalls, auctions and fellowship!

Holiday Specific Events

Holiday-themed events are a great way of bringing people to partake at special times of the year! These kinds of events are great for children and families, and can really help enrich a child’s extracurricular activities.

• Christmas Fair: You can have some real fun decorating stalls in the festive spirit, and can get kids involved in crafts to make things exciting for them! The choir can perform carols, and you can even include a surprise visit from Santa himself! (with little gifts, of course)
• Nativity Play: A Nativity play is a great way of teaching younger children the story of Jesus, while also helping them build confidence and a connection with the church.
• Easter Egg Hunt: Hard-boil and decorate some eggs, then hide them around your church and any grounds you have around it! You can then announce an easter-egg hunt for the kids, with delicious prizes at stake. This one is just a bit of fun for the family and can provide some great family bonding experiences.
• Easter Bake Sale: You can have younger members of your church bake some goods, and then sell them at some point during or around your Easter service. Having all proceeds go to the church upkeep or charity is a great way of teaching young people to help their local community whilst having fun!

Best Practices for Hosting Great Church Events

Now you know what types of events you can run, let’s go over some things that you can do to make these events successful!

Be Patient And Understanding

A lot of these events are to help people disenfranchised by religion reconnect with their local church. Being too pushy can discourage them from participating.

You can help them patch their relationship with their faith by being patient and understanding, instead of just providing them with events and activities to enrich their lives. This will allow them to have a positive connection with the church, meaning they’re more likely to come back.

Host A Variety Of Events

As explained before, hosting a variety of events regularly will allow the most amount of different people to get involved with activities.

Make Sure Your Schedule Is Clear and Consistent

Hosting an event is great, but next to useless if nobody knows that it’s on. You can prevent this from happening by making sure that it’s clear when your events are.

Organising regular events (weekly, monthly, etc.) is a great way to get people into the habit of attending!

Keep Your Events Organized

When hosting events, you need to make sure that there’s no confusion as to when the event is. You also need to make sure that everyone volunteering knows, and that you can communicate this information to as many people as possible.

With Chmeetings, communicating with your congregation has never been easier. With our service, you can easily make sure that everything is kept track of with tidy and organized calendar integration. You can also make sure that you can contact people whenever necessary, and have a record of who’s about!

Organizing events for your church has never been easier!

Free Your Church’s Potential With CHMeetings

Hosting events can seem tricky, but hopefully, you’ve found this article useful in learning  everything you need to know about hosting the best church events possible!

The most important part of any church is its community, and by hosting events you can make sure that the community is nurtured and can bond naturally. You can also just do good for those around you by hosting community-focused events, which can help your church remain a pillar and paragon of your community.

To be able to run great events, your church has to be well organized. Chmeetings can ensure that’s the case, and make your life much easier in keeping track of everything.

Our Church App makes it much easier for your community to be able to keep in the loop of what’s happening locally. Also, our group productivity tools mean that you can collaborate in groups easily, to take care of what’s important.

So, why not give Chmeetings a try for free today?