Churches draw small number of visitors

Local leaders say early Easter
affects outreach campaign

By Rachel L. Toalson
Staff Writer
Church leaders say they had trouble publicizing this year’s Bring a Friend Sunday because it landed so close to the Home for Christmas campaign—and was very similar to it.
“We did not push it like we did Home for Christmas,” said Kay Plummer, who organizes the campaigns at Grace UMC, Corpus Christi. “It was a little too soon, and it used the same promotional stuff. We had worked so hard for Home for Christmas that when I started looking at this, it was just too quick.
“And it was the same (effort). You sent out cards, you hang door hangars. When it’s this close to each other, we need a different program.”
Bring a Friend Sunday, the Lenten version of Home for Christmas, encourages churches to focus on reaching new people for Christ by using a special hospitality Sunday during Lent. This year’s recommended Bring a Friend Sunday was March 9.
Sandy McKenney, church secretary for First UMC, Boerne, said the campaign, which is typically used the Sunday before Palm Sunday, came a little earlier this year—probably because Easter fell in March instead of April.
Bring a Friend Sunday also fell on the Sunday of the daylight-saving time change, she said.
“We thought that maybe it was not the best Sunday to have it,” McKin-ney said. “It was also daylight saving, and we think that’s part of the reason our attendance was down.”
McKenney said the church still saw a good number of visitors, but it usually does—so she couldn’t say it was because of Bring a Friend Sunday.
Grace UMC and four other Corpus Christi congregations hosted Bring a Furry Feathered Friend events March 8. Those provided free pet wellness exams by local veterinarians the Saturday before Bring a Friend Sunday. Grace saw a good response from that, Plummer said.
Grace also had its spring market March 8. A couple of vendors visited the church the next day.
Plummer admitted that all the events were difficult for her welcoming team to pull off.
“It all sounded good for it all to be together,” she said. “But it overwhelmed us. I really didn’t have the resources or the people to do both things.”
Still, Plummer said leaders are compiling a list of visitors—which they got from the registrations for a drawing—who attended the spring market and the pet wellness exams, and they plan to follow up with every one.
“And, perhaps, if they are looking for a church home, they will come back,” Plummer said.
Part of what helped Grace with advertising, Plummer said, was putting a flier in the local newspaper. The church printed 10,000 fliers with information about the special events and Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday celebrations, and paid $660 to have the fliers inserted into the paper that would be delivered to nearby homes.
The Rev. Charles Graff, pastor of St. Luke’s UMC, Corpus Christi, said his congregation began Bring a Friend Sunday with a kickoff prayer vigil back in January and sent out prayer cards to members—so they could pray for the people they would invite to church.
The church scheduled Bring a Friend Sunday March 16, along with a fellowship dinner. Church members were given invitation cards March 2 to hand out to their “bank teller, storekeeper, waitress or friends,” Graff said.
He said extending invitations to friends gives God’s love a chance to work through relationships.
“Reaching out by bringing a friend is giving God’s love a chance,” he said. “The act of reaching out is not to be done with an attitude of judgment but rather one of grace. Reaching out is the assurance that we are willing to live out our beliefs.”
Bring a Friend Sunday is the third of three annual Southwest Texas Conference outreach efforts done between September and Easter in conjunction with the denominationwide Igniting Ministry’s hospitality and image campaign.