147: Why Using A Blue Christmas Service This Year Can Boost Community Outreach And Increase Connection

Effective community outreach involves a lot more than just getting people in the door of your church. 

Successful outreach involves building connections where there were none, growing in awareness of needs outside your church walls, and stepping out to meet them. 

Christmastime is the perfect season to lean into the needs of your community.

Listen in to this week’s episode to hear:

1. Three things great outreach churches have in common
2. One need all of our communities have in common
3. How to use elements from a Blue Christmas service to open up ministry opportunities in women's ministry, Sunday School, youth group, and more

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Transcript

Laurie Acker: 0:01

Hey, this is Laurie Acker, welcome to the small church ministry podcast. Hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of the small church ministry podcast. If you are in a church under 200 we are here for you. Whether you've got 20 on a Sunday, 4080, or you're pushing that 200 limit, we totally get smaller numbers. We get smaller budgets. We get the intergenerational family feel. We get the goodness that small churches bring, and we understand the challenges too. I am so grateful that you decided to spend some time with me today as we jump into yet another episode of the small church ministry Podcast. Today, we are talking about outreach, and specifically outreach around the holidays. Recently, somebody posted on our Facebook community. They were talking about all the trunk or treats and fall festivals happening, and they're like, every church is doing this. What should I call mine? Or what could I do instead? And I loved this question because this person was thinking about, what, what sets our church apart? What can we do differently? So often, we see every church in a community, all across the nation, even all across the world doing similar things. And the reality is we don't have to keep doing everything like everyone else. When we do something different, something unique, we're not just making a statement, but we're meeting different needs. So I'm really excited to talk about Christmas, specifically talking about outreach and getting into your community this Christmas. Before the end of this episode, you're going to hear about three things that I have found in common for any church that does great outreach, three things that set them apart. We're going to talk about one thing we all have in common, especially this Christmas, and I'm going to share a little bit specifically about how to use a Blue Christmas service, or elements from it, maybe just little pieces of it, in whatever ministry you're in, fresh ideas, greater impact. That's what we love. And if you've been curious about this Blue Christmas service or looking for some fresh Christmas ideas, we've got a great deal going on this week as well, which I'll tell you at the very end of the podcast. So let's talk first, just about outreach before we get into Christmas. Because outreach, reaching out has to do with getting outside our church walls. And I want to tell you the churches that I have seen do outreach Well, consistently building relationships in their community. They all have these three things in common. Okay? The first one is this, when churches that are great at Outreach think about outreach, they have a long term vision in mind, not just a one and done event. They're not thinking, Oh, what's the next great outreach event we can do. It's actually built into their DNA, their church culture. They're not just thinking event. They're thinking, how can we build relationships? How can we meet needs when you have that long term in mind? It's not about this weekend or next month or next summer. It's about building a reputation of who you are, what you want to be seen as in your community. It's really very beautiful when a church develops a reputation in their community of being the Community Church. Or in one of our episodes, Pastor Jeff talks about the fact that he realized he was the community pastor, when people would refer to him as their pastor who he had never even met. So churches that really reach their communities, well, have this long term vision in mind. They're not throwing out events. They're building reputations to being seen as a place where people are welcome, where people can come, where they have needs, where the church exists for them. The second thing that I've seen in common with all churches that do outreach well is they have a huge focus on building relationships, even if no one comes back to the church. There's a value in it. It's not that they don't want people coming to their church. Of course they do, but the value exists outside of that. So when churches who really reach their communities well have a reputation for reaching their communities, they find value in building those relationships, and I believe it is so Jesus, like they're not evaluating the impact of their event or the success of their outreach event based on who came back to church the next week or even the next year. The value of that relationship stands alone and. If we built relationships, if we met needs, if we have that long term vision. Which leads us to the third thing that all churches, who I have seen that reach their communities well have in common, and the third thing is they are focused and aware of meeting real needs in their community. They actually seek them out, and they look at what's around us, what's unique, what are the needs that are not being met, whether it is developing a grief share program or reaching into homelessness or offering workshops on stress management or anxiety for families, for professionals, but these churches that do outreach, well, do all three things, all these three things, number one, they keep the long term in mind. They are building a long term reputation that will far outlast the people in their immediate church right now. The second thing is, they find value. They see the value in building relationships outside the church walls, even if nobody ever comes into the church building. And the third thing I've seen in common is that they are focused on discovering, uncovering and meeting real needs in their community, not just in offering a family focused event that has a water slide and hot dogs. Okay, now I kind of mentioned that a lot when I talk about outreach, and I just want to say I've done those types of events where we give free food on Fourth of July and have a water slide. They are beautiful. Please hear me. They're great, but they're not all. We've got to do better than that if we want to make a difference in our modern culture. There are so many needs out there, and where are people turning? Let's be the places where they turn. Now I just want to say we share these stories a lot. As I mentioned, Pastor Jeff shaust was on our podcast that was episode 109 he talked about being a community pastor. So amazing. Episode 71 on the podcast, we had Shanika Dixon on talking about how her church, of 40 people, feeds hundreds and hundreds of people every week in their community, they have this amazing food pantry ministry, where not only are they ministering, reaching out by giving food to people in the community, but their volunteers actually come from the community, so they are building reputations, even in the serving of it so beautiful. And I'm just going to mention one other story for you to check out if you want to learn more about outreach. But Becky Sargent was on Episode 103 her church down in Cape Coral, Florida, does such cool stuff in their community. One of the things they do is they have a community yard sale. Now they're not running the yard sale. They open their their campus, and there it's a small church again, but it's they open their campus for people in the community to have a yard sale. But the way they serve the community, then it is so cool. Please check out that episode. That's 103, if you want to hear about that. But these three churches I just mentioned, what is so different, unique and cool about what they do is they're looking at the needs in their community. They're also looking at what they have to give, what makes their small church body unique, and they're matching it up. So they're looking at the uniquenesses around them and also the uniquenesses in their small church. We talk a lot about small churches being so different than any other church. Your church is so different than my church, it's almost like the smaller the church is, the more unique it is, because we don't have the masses, we're not going to like this common denominator of a whole lot of people. It makes us very unique, and we talk often about like our unique niches, right? Like, what is happening in your community? Is there care facility nearby? Do you have homeschool groups that could use your facility during the week. Do you have young families? Is it an older community? You know, what are kind of the general, I don't know, the population, like the the work jobs, you know, is a lot of blue collar. Is it a lot of white collar? Is it a lot of college students? We talk a lot about what's different today, I want to talk about one thing we all have in common, and a ministry opportunity that all of us, I'm going to tell you right now, our communities are really different, but there is this that we all have in common. And I want to talk a little bit about Christmas. Christmas is coming. It's coming up soon. There is an incredible opportunity as Christmas is dawning on us. Now, I know some churches that actually say we don't do anything different at Christmas. It's just our regular services. Christmas is a secular holiday, you know, or it's been secularized, I should say, and we can just continue on with what we're doing. And I just want to say, I think you're missing something. I. If you're doing that now, I also understand the reason to pull back in a lot of our church cultures, Christmas has become so busy and so overwhelming that we're like, okay, let's just do less. I'm all for doing less, but what I want you to think about are the needs that kind of bubble up at Christmas time because there is an increased felt need no matter where you're at, rural city, suburban village. Doesn't matter where you're at. If you're around at Christmas time, you will see this happening, and it's an incredible opportunity for our churches to step in. And this is what it looks like around Christmas time. There is more focus on family, on presents, on happy, shiny relationships, on getting together with friends, on you know, whether there you do Christmas trees or presents or do decorations outside. What happens with this happy, shiny, I don't know like picture is it increases our own awareness of loneliness, grief, broken relationships, financial pressure, just different losses like think of it, most of us are aware that, like depression and loneliness, even suicide rates go up during the holidays. Why is this? Because there is so much focus on the opposite that every single one of us is more aware of loss. If there's someone in your life that you've lost, you know what that first holiday is like, that first Christmas, that first Thanksgiving, they're so hard because the joy that surrounds us and the celebration reminds us not only of what we have, but also of what we don't have or what we've lost. And this happens in all of our communities and even at every age level. There is no time of year when a child is more aware of what they do not have than at Christmas time. There is no time of year when adult is more aware of loss, broken relationships, shattered dreams, than at Christmas time. And this is where we have an opportunity to step in, to make a difference, to do something different. One of the common comments in our Facebook community recently, again, was all about, you know, fall festivals and trunk or treats. And this person said, What should I do instead? Can I say, Can we say this also for Christmas, every church, or most churches have a Christmas Eve service. Are we just all competing in the whole realm of outreach? I'm not saying you shouldn't have a Christmas Eve service, but how many times are we focused on how do we invite the community to Christmas Eve and they are bombarded with invitations. What if you invited them to something a little bit different and something that actually met a very real need? I'm gonna just talk a little bit about something called a Blue Christmas service. You can hear more about it in Episode 41, of the small church ministry podcast. I did a podcast kind of diving into what a Blue Christmas service is and all the elements back in october 2022 I'm not going to restate everything I stated then, but I really want to talk about why a Blue Christmas service can really meet an outreach need, and it can provide something that many communities are not providing, that meets a very, very real need. Because I don't care how happy and wonderful your life is right now or those around you, every single one of us has loss, every single one of us has grief. Every single one of us has dreams that aren't quite materializing this Christmas season, and every single one of us wants hope, and that's what a Blue Christmas service is about. A Blue Christmas service, just a real quick overview, is a service that happens during the holiday season, but it's basically an alternative and additional service where we can acknowledge loss or grief or stress or world pressure, world tragedies, even. And it's. Not a service of depression. It is a service of hope, but it is a place where we can come together in our humanity and actually just make space for it. Oftentimes, there's candle lightings, there's responsive readings, there's meaningful videos, but I would just like to suggest that every single community, every single group of people, could benefit from having a place like this. Have you ever seen a community even have like a community tree somewhere where you could go up and and add the name of a person that you were thinking of or praying for, or someone you had lost in the past, a prayer tree, a prayer wall, a place of remembrance, special services that happen when there is an incredible loss, or to acknowledge a community tragedy. These types of things bring communities together. They build relationships. They build connection. So if you think about a Blue Christmas service, oftentimes people think of it as it's being the entire service. If you want to learn more about this, please check out our blog post. Please go back and listen to, as I mentioned, Episode 41 but a Blue Christmas service has a lot of different elements. Again, it's often used as a worship service set apart on a Tuesday night or a Sunday evening, maybe with a soup supper. And you walk into this very reflective, this reflective, I don't know, atmosphere where it's a little bit quieter, where the songs leave a little room for not just Joy to the world and happiness, but saying, Hey, we know this is a mixed time for everyone. The Blue Christmas surface focuses on the hope that's coming. Come thou long expected Jesus, and we talk in Blue Christmas service about sadness and pain, but about the the flip side of the hope, because that is Christmas, you can't have hope. You don't need hope if there's no darkness. It's one of my favorite passages that I love to read at Christmas is, you know, those walking in darkness have seen a great light. It's the contrast of it. The Blue Christmas service that we have available on our website. It's a service that I personally wrote because I wasn't finding what I wanted that was out there. But there's five candles of remembrance in a Blue Christmas service. And the first candle we remember family and friends who we have loved and lost, whether it was through death or life transition or broken relationships or estrangement. And then there's a word of hope. The second candle, we talk about the stuff of life we have lost, or the loss of trust, the loss of things, our jobs, our finances, our health, and a word of hope. The third candle, we remember the person we used to be, the person we became ourselves. We remember ourselves, our memories, the mixed bag of emotions that we carry, and there is a word of hope and compassion as we think about who we are and who we'd love to be, what we'd love to experience. The fourth candle is about our hurting world, and we can pray for those suffering across the ocean, across the country from us, facing tragedy, injustice. And there's a word of hope. And the fifth candle we remember this gift of God, the hope in the very season of Christmas, time out of darkness, the light has come. These are some of the elements in a Blue Christmas service. Now, what I want to mention, we've had questions on this before. Laurie, I am in women's ministry. I just teach a Bible study, or I am a youth leader, or I'm a Sunday school teacher. I love this concept, but I'm not in charge of the church, and I say, woo hoo, yay, because you can bring these elements to the people that are in your circle. You don't need to have a Blue Christmas service on a Sunday night to bring in compassion and empathy and awareness of the fact that that 16 year old sitting in front of you has a lot of pain and is struggling with all sorts of things. In the holidays, you can bring all the elements that are in a Blue Christmas service one at a time. Time just choose one that you love. Maybe it's the video that's suggested. Maybe it's one of the readings that talks about Advent and hope and the darkness and the light. Maybe it is the full service with the five candles that you're gonna bring into your Sunday school class. You know, on Sunday morning, I really wanted to talk about this because so many of us are not the pastors. We're not the worship leaders. We're not the council who's in charge of putting a full nother thing on the calendar, but the elements that are in a Blue Christmas service individually or all together, even the Christmas the Scripture cards that you can print out of hope, they give you endless options of things to add, even into your children's Sunday school class, a video to play at the beginning of a of The Sunday sermon. And how is this about outreach? I started this podcast saying, I want to talk about outreach. I want to talk about reaching our communities. Can I just say a Blue Christmas service or the elements in it? 100% will set you up to be building a reputation of trust. Remember that long term vision I mentioned the beginning of the podcast. The churches that do really well at Outreach, they have a long term vision for building a reputation of trust, a place where people can come and they know they will be welcome and they will be served. They build a reputation and have see value in building relationships, in meeting real needs in their community, the elements of a Blue Christmas service, whether it's all together in one service or pulled apart in different pieces, they speak to all three of those things. You could be the only church in your community that acknowledges grief and loss, that invites the community back for a service with those five candles, or the only youth group in town that says, Hey kids, let's get together and talk about what we don't have today, and let's really look at the hope that we could find in Christ. But before that, we're not glossing over it. We're not adding Jesus frosting to your tough situation. We are acknowledging that we are all human. We all have loss, we all have grief. And when we come together and we share this empathy, this compassion, this quiet time of yeah, this is hard, we can journey together. We can struggle together. It's a both, and it's not an either or if you do happen to look up this Blue Christmas service, or you're already kind of intrigued by it, or maybe you're aware of it already, I just want to talk a little bit about different ways to utilize this in your community, reaching out, building a reputation, building relationships where there were none. Just a few ways to to kind of bring this to your community. One is to partner with a few other churches. Blue Christmas services are small. The success of Blue Christmas services are not about having a whole bunch of people come. It's about meeting the needs of those who come, you could offer a Blue Christmas service in your community and have maybe two new people show up, or maybe 15 people from your own congregation. But you will see, you will see an impact that you've never seen anywhere else, because this isn't usually offered around the holidays or ever in churches, you could offer a community service. You know, maybe you could do it at the YMCA or a community recreation place like have it off site. Don't even have it at your church. Have it outside if you're in a warmer climate, or bring elements of it into, like a coffee hour at a local coffee shop. Do it differently. Just utilize the elements differently. Invite people from your community in, even for like a workshop on grief or depression in the holidays, and add one of the elements from the Blue Christmas service, when we can acknowledge loss and grief and troubles. This is the opportunity that leads. To hope. A few other ways to reach into your community. Actually reach out to some of the mental health professionals, counselors, even within the school districts, let them know about this community service that that you may offer, and see how they could contribute. Many of them will even help promote this type of service, because it brings so much, just so much healing and hope to so many people. Another idea is to have a display somewhere outside, not just in your building. It could be in a community, place where you've received permission, or even outside on your grounds, where people can add their tribute to a person they've lost, words of hope or inspiration for others during the holidays. As we go into the Christmas season this year, please consider not just another outreach event, but how doing outreach well, how reaching beyond church walls well and effectively, has to do with the long term, building a reputation of acknowledging, of seeing the hurt in your community and being a place that's going To meet needs, of finding value in building relationships outside the church walls, and of meeting very real needs in your community the holidays, man, there are opportunities that pop up that people are more open to The Church, to acknowledging loss and grief to really looking at difficult stuff more open at Christmas time than at any other time of the year. So if a Blue Christmas service is new to you, please check it out. Just dive in a little bit. If you are looking for a done for you resource, check out our Blue Christmas service. We have a deal on it. This week, I hunted everywhere for a Blue Christmas service that would fit what I was looking for, which was a little bit more contemporary, but still had the, you know, really reflective air to it, something that was a little more modern, something that fit our people really well. And so this service is based on what I designed that I couldn't find anywhere. Maggie added these amazing graphics to it, a full service order template, a bulletin, postcards, social media, promotion, so much more. But this has a full custom written service as well, the full scripts, the readings suggested videos and everything, all of those elements, including like scripture, cards of hope that are printable, plus a recorded workshop that actually gives you extra tips for success. But if you're looking for this resource that is done for you, we have a special deal this week only till Saturday at midnight. I'm just laughing right now because I threw in the full replays of one of our favorite small church conferences that we did, called a small church Christmas. So if you purchase the Blue Christmas service this week for $29 or we also have a separate Advent pack. If you are a worship leader and you're looking for that, we are tossing in as a bonus the full set of replays from a small church Christmas conference that we had last year. There are over 25 sessions in there, and each are focused on less stress and greater impact, women's ministry, outreach, children and more. Again, that's just a special bonus, but check it out at small church ministry.com/christmas and the link is in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed this week's episode about the Blue Christmas service and just about more effective outreach. Really praying that as as the modern church culture shifts because I really believe it is from being program centered and performative to being relational and based on meeting needs. We are going to see more and more effectiveness as we do things differently from everyone else, and it is not that difficult to do something different, something creative, something that meets the needs of those around you. And this is just one way we've made it easy for you. Check out that bundle at small church ministry.com/christmas and that limited time offer this week you're going to love it. Next week, on the podcast, we have another special guest, Pete singer is joining us from the organization grace, which is godly responses to abuse in the Christian environment. We're going to be talking a little bit about healthy church systems, how to more clearly recognize on health, how to move toward. Healthier church systems and even what to do about it when we're not in charge. So I'm looking forward to that conversation next week, until then, be a light you