It is challenging to plan a ministry outreach for any holiday and even more so when we want to recruit volunteers to help with it. Because there are so many things to do for successful outreach and our minds are pre-occupied with the event, it is easy to short-change our congregations in how we communicate to them about what is going on and what we need them to do.

Here is a flyer we created to remedy that situation

As a very practical example, at our church, with the Adult Sunday School Class we are hosting a Thanksgiving outreach dinner. I've been working on it for some time and for it to be successful, we need many in the class to be involved. Though they have known we are doing this for some time--we just got the final approval of the location last week. I needed to let the class know and to let them know what we needed them to do.

My first idea was to simply do a PowerPoint Slide and announce it, but I knew that wasn't enough. I reminded myself of what I constantly try to teach that those of us who work and plan ministry events must always remember that the people we want to involve haven't been working on it as we have; they haven't been thinking and praying about it for as long as we have. They can't read our minds.

People need a tangible, paper, printed reminder of what we are doing and what we want them to do. Once the print piece is produced, we can put it on our information table for those who might have missed the first announcement and remind people about it in subsequent weeks.

We have to clearly share our vision and requests

We have a lot going on, we want people to do a number of things. Though in the coming weeks I will have specific task lists and sign-up sheets I wanted to give people a flyer that specifically told them:

• what was going on
• basic information
• our goals
• prayer requests
• what we needed them to do

The flyer illustrated here is what I came up with. The information is what is most important here and it was well-received.

It seems like we never have the time to put together things like this, but they are vitally important for as many people as possible to be involved in ministry events and outreach.

CLICK HERE to DOWNLOAD a PDF of the flyer.