20 Ways to Kick Start Your Outreach
Jacob Paris

When it comes to outreach, can you truthfully say that your church reaches out beyond your own walls? Besides work-related contacts, how many people in your congregation honestly touch a part of your community? It’s not tough at all to find people in your community with needs that your church can help meet. Here are 20 ideas that scratch the surface for utilizing your facility and people in local service.

1. Hold a health fair in your gym or foyer.
2. Provide child care during a community agency’s meetings.
3. Adopt a family in need for a year.
4. Provide office space in your church facility for an agency.
5. Hold church-wide clothing and food drives.
6. Plant a community garden and donate crops to local food banks.
7. Recruit drivers for meal-delivery organizations.
8. Provide meeting space for drug and alcohol addiction recovery programs.
9. Create after-school activities or tutoring services for children and youth.
10. Offer employment counseling and training.
11. Provide classroom space and computer workstations for community education programs.
12. Create an adult day-care program for seniors to give primary caregivers a break.
13. Deliver bag lunches to homeless people.
14. Collect and distribute birthday gifts for children of prisoners.
15. Raise funds to upgrade equipment used by people with disabilities.
16. Gather and donate maternity clothes for a crisis pregnancy center.
17. Recruit six other churches to rotate dinner or overnight shelter for homeless families once per week.
18. Provide training for counselors who work with rape or domestic violence victims.
19. Set aside a room in your facility where senior adults from the community can gather for conversation, games, and crafts.
20. Hold an agency volunteer recruitment fair at your church facility. Encourage church members and other interested citizens to gather information on multiple agencies in one place.

If you’re unfamiliar with the social and community service agencies in your area, here’s a simple way to find them and their contact information. Log onto www.dexonline.com. Enter the city and state where you live, and click the Search button. The next screen will display a list of categories. Scroll down and choose Government & Community. The resulting screen will provide subcategories such as Charitable Organizations and Community Organizations. Choose areas of interest for your church, and keep digging down until you find contact information for specific agencies.

This article “20 Ways to Kick Start Your Outreach” by Jacob Paris was excerpted from: www.preachingunleashed.com web site. October 2010. It may be used for study & research purposes only.

This article may not be written by an Apostolic author, but it contains many excellent principles and concepts that can be adapted to most churches. As the old saying goes “Eat the meat. Throw away the bones.”