You have a sponsoring or supporting church that wants to send a missions team to help you get your new church plant started. Want some good uses of the free labor? Here are 5 creative ideas for church missions teams:
These ideas are roughly in chronological order based on when a planter would typically use them in the pre-launch season of the church plant.
Serve in the Community
This is the one that usually comes to mind first. You want to make a positive impact in your community, so you plan an event that your church missions teams can participate in. Maybe you’re passing out water bottles or doing a big park cleanup. The problem is that these events cost your church plant money. How many water bottles can team hand out in an hour? A lot!
The creative idea is to have church missions teams raise support to come, and have them set their goal a little higher than the cost of just travel. The teams come with seed money to cover the cost of the event! It’s very common for missions teams to do that when they travel abroad on a short-term missions trip. Your church plant is a fantastic missions field.
Create Content
My friend and church planter Brent Captain came up with this idea: he used a part of his church missions team’s time to write online ad content.
Through his network of acquaintances, he invited a local marketing professor to come and teach the team for 30 minutes about online presence & digital marketing. Then the team wrote new ad copy for an hour or so.
His online ad arsenal went from a handful of ads to dozens over night. And there was something significant about having fresh eyes write the ads: over the following months, Salt Christian Church went from a few hundred ad clicks every month to several thousand.
Deliver Marketing
I’ve had mixed feedback from planters who have done a major door hanger campaign. The line is pretty distinctly drawn between those that used their Launch Team to put out the door hangers and those that had an outside group walk the neighborhoods. Planters that have their own team spend several weekends in a row putting out door hangers almost unanimously tell me that they burned their people out and they’d never do it that way again.
If you’re doing some kind of every-door campaign or flyer blitz, consider using your church missions teams to get them out.
Prayer Walk
Planting a new church is an invasion of sorts. Where faith, hope & love are advanced, there will be opposition. Plan for part of the church missions team’s trip to be spend praying in and around your city.
Serve on Sunday Teams
Church missions teams could staff one of the volunteer teams at a preview service, or even the grand opening. Doing that may help bolster the team’s ranks or just give people on your Launch Team who are super inviters of friends the chance to spend a Sunday alongside their guests instead of serving behind the scenes somewhere.
What other creative ideas have you seen for church missions teams? Post your comments to me over on social media!