For me, fifth Sundays has always felt like a natural Sunday to do something different than normal. But our church has always struggled to figure out what exactly that different-than-normal thing should be.
We’ve tried missions’ Sundays, experiential Sundays, game-show Sundays, you name it. But it’s always felt kinda unfocused; like we weren’t doing it with the impact we could. So this year we sat down and decided to get really intentional with fifth Sundays.
We prayed and asked God what he wanted us to focus on, and the word he gave was “plant,” from 1 Corinthians 3:6 where Paul says, “I planted the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered it, but it was God who made it grow.”
We feel like we do a decent job at watering (although there’s always room for improvement), but we haven’t been planting as many seeds of the Gospel as God wants us to in our community.
So we ended up deciding to leverage fifth Sundays to be planting days.
To the kids and families in our church we call them “Invite Days.”
The idea is really simple: Through the lens of a lost family, you ask yourself, What could we do at our church that they would be excited to come to?
It doesn’t have to be expensive or labor intensive.
It just has to be something special that your lost neighbors and friends would want their kids to experience.
For example, on the fifth Sunday in January, we are doing an indoor snow day.
The day’s gonna consist of: 1) a Large Group Game, 2) a Snowball Fight, 3) a Hot Chocolate/Apple Cider Bar and Popcorn, and 4) a Gospel Presentation.
For the game we’re having five kids come up, put vaseline on their cheeks and chins, and stick their faces in a bowl of cotton balls for one minute to see who can get the nicest beard (all you need is a jar of vaseline and cotton balls).
For the snowball fight, we’re splitting the group into two teams, giving them 10 minutes to build a fort using cardboard boxes and folding chairs, and then giving them “indoor snowballs.” (Here’s a link; they are $30 for 50.)
For the popcorn, our church owns a popcorn machine, but you could just get giant bags of popcorn at Walmart on the cheap.
You can also purchase big containers of hot chocolate mix and apple cider mix at Walmart relatively inexpensively.
For this event, our costs are going to be around $200, and we’ll only need five or six volunteers.
Side note, we haven’t actually done this event yet, so we don’t know how well it will work, but the more important point is that you can do something different on fifth Sundays without breaking the bank or your volunteers’ backs to reach lost families in your community.
As some more examples to help get you thinking; here’s our ideas for the rest of the year:
April: We’re going to have outdoor games and a picnic.
July: We’re going to have a water day.
October: We’re going to have a Fall Festival during and after services instead of on a separate day.
December: We’re going to have a pancake breakfast with entertainment.
Do you have any ideas for great Fifth Sunday Invite Days? Leave a comment.
This article originally appeared here.
