Big Weekend Coming

Months ago we began planning at Hope.  The idea was a type of “Friendship Sunday” – where the congregation is encouraged to bring a friend to church with them.  That name sounded very 1970’s so we landed on the in-house name of “The Big Weekend”.  (I got the idea from Nelson Sersey’s book, “Ignite” where he calls it the “Big Day”.  And finally we made it our own by calling it, “Extending Hope Weekend”.   We wanted to take this to a new level. 

1.  We set a goal of doubling the attendance.  We are a church for the unchurched and are always looking for ways to reach out to as many folks as possible in the community who might have given up on church.   This would mean 14,000 total for the weekend and if that happens we are in deep trouble with parking — that is unless people come at our less traditional times of 5:30 on Saturday and 8:00 AM on Sunday.  We are praying for 10,000 and if God blesses us with more, He will have to help us out.

2.  We wanted to have a special guest who would be a part of our regular worship.  A mistake some churches make is to bring in all the bells and whistles — with dancing dogs and pyrotechnics — and blow the doors off.  But the problem is that people will come back the following week and it will be a huge letdown.  Therefore, we wanted to have something very special but presented in such a way that people will experience what we do EVERY week at Hope.  Okay, the cool thing is that we got Amy Grant to come and join us.  She is a long-time friend of our worship leader, Bruce Carroll so he extended the invitation and she accepted.  We are pumped.

3.  We prepared the people of Hope through a 3 week series entitled, “Dare to Invest in Others”.  The first week we focused on prayer.  We encouraged folks to start praying for the friends and family members they would invite for the weekend.  We also put the teaser out there that we would be having a special guest joining us for the weekend.  The second week focused on making the move to share with others pointing to Christ as he called his disciples and how God called us.  The third week focused on making the invite to others as Christ’s ambassadors (2 Cor. 5:18-20).   And this Monday we announced via email and Web that Amy was coming. 

4.  In wanting our people to invite and pick up their friends (to add a personal touch and to address the parking crunch issue), we came up with the idea of asking local restaurants to offer a discount for our people that weekend.  We are listing about 25 local restaurants in a bulletin insert that can be taken to one of the restaurants for a deal on their meal. 

5.  Another cool element is Amy’s involvement with St. Jude Children’s Hospital and especially Target House.  We will be highlighting Target House in our foyer during the weekend. 

We are praying like crazy for a great weekend — that God will bring together who He wants to be here and that it will be a life-changing encounter with Christ.