Making the Most of Easter

This year our church is combining our Easter services with an outreach effort to families. By hosting a breakfast and an Easter Egg hunt between our sunrise service and our Sunday School we are providing an opportunity for families to celebrate Easter with us. We did this with a degree of success while I was in Florida and managed to reach out to several families we would not have reached otherwise. The fact that we are doing this has brought raised some concerns though within my thinking process. Most of our churches are engaged in sign evangelism. Mainly we hang out the open sign and hope that the people will come into our churches. The problem is that we do this poorly. We do not follow up on the visitors that do stumble into our churches and we often fail to make them feel welcome. We have committed the sin of partiality as described in James 2. While James points this at those who would honor the wealthy and despise the poor, we tend to honor the familiar and ignore the new. Rather than displaying the love of Christ to those who come into our times of worship we tend to ignore them. I am not talking about a false smile and a fake handshake, but a genuine delight in their presence that they might hear the word of God and be changed by their encounter with him during our times of worship. This week as visitors enter our churches for their annual Easter visit, let us show them something different. Let's show them the love of Christ and the joy of the Lord in our actions, activities, and expressions. Let's make them feel welcome and appreciated. Finally, let's get some contact information so that we can follow up with them. God's blessiings