I carried on with prayer and Bible study, but the children’s ministry took the night off. Some of the leaders stayed home and did some evangelistic stuff in neighborhoods. We had our “Fall Festival” last weekend. I was out of town and haven’t heard how things went.
Sounds like a lot of churches had Halloween parties (though the word never appears – its all Fall Festival or Harvest Night or whatever cover we use).
Those draw big numbers but are they evangelistically effective?
Let’s talk about it
By the way, folks, if you have a party at your church on October 31, and kids dress up and you hand out candy, you can call it a Fall Festival or a Harvest Festival or whatever other name you like, but no one is fooled.
It’s a Halloween Party!
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
At my last church, we actually did a “Halloween Party”… At my present church, our town has a sight and safety night where different businesses and organizations line main street and hand out candy and such from 5-7pm… and we’re on main street as is, so our Women on Missions team handed that out, we canceled AWANA, took a poll among those who normally come to prayer meeting, and most of them we’re either helping with WoM, taking grandkids trick ‘r treating, or didn’t want to drive at night with a bunch of kids on the street, so we canceled… Read more »
We cancelled all other activities and had a “Trunk or Treat” event in our parking lot. Members decorated their cars and gave candy to trick-or-treaters out of their opened trunks. I decorated our van with a “Jonah and the Great Fish” theme, complete with Jonah’s legs hanging out the back of the van. No dark, ghoulish decorations were present. This was our second year doing it, and it serves as a connection event to people in our community. Not much real evangelism took place last night, but we handed out information on our church ministries (especially those to children and… Read more »
We had a “Fall Family Festival” last Sunday and then nothing on Wednesday.
Good part: we discourage “scary” or “spooky” costumes. Bad part: one of the highlights of my week .. and, I’ve been told, of some of the other folks, is my Wednesday night Bible study .. and we didn’t have it this week.
We have rides and inflatables in the parking lot and Fellowship Hall. We have a Welcome Center set up where families can get their kids a bag of candy to start with and talk to our people. In various rooms throughout the church are games for the younger kids to win more candy or small prizes, face painting, a Cakewalk, free popcorn, etc. We call it the socially acceptable “Fall Festival”. It’s not exceptionally evangelistic, but it serves to help the church develop a positive relationship with the surrounding community for future relational (individual) evangelism. So members come out to… Read more »
Dave,
We did nothing special. When I got into my grandchildren’s candy my blood sugar shot thru the roof, I got dizzy, and felt awful. It’s amazing
what only fifteen peices of candy can do.
A pastor friend of mine reluctantly agreed to his people’s request to schedule their fall festival on Halloween. He draws the line at doing it on Sunday, but allowed it to take the Wednesday service. I joked with him about capitulating to culture and he responded that it’s sort of sad that we Baptists will observe a Catholic holiday (Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, All Saint’s Eve) yet very few know about the Protestant celebration that day. I hedged my bets. We had services as normal and I spoke on the Reformation, but I sent my kids to my friend’s church… Read more »
We had a massive Fall Festival last night. Hundreds of people from the surrounding neighborhoods came. On Sunday, we went out and passed out 1200 invitations to the surrounding homes. We are a predominatley white church (though this is changing) in a majority black city and part of town. So, we have events where we can all come together and where we can provide a good experience for people. We share the gospel, had a prayer table set up, and show Christian hospitality. Parents do not have to go with their kids to knock on strangers doors. They are loved… Read more »
We had our 3rd Annual “Trunk-or-Treat” event where church members handed out candy from the back of cars/vans. We also had bounce houses for the kids and free popcorn and soda (or “pop” for some of you). We also gave away thousands of Gospel tracts and shared the love of Christ with over 4,000 of our neighbors. Overall, it was a great to be salt and light on one of the “darkest” nights of the year. Thanks and God bless,
Howell
“and soda (or ‘pop’ for some of you)”
The proper generic term is ‘coke’. Ie, a common conversation in this neck of the woods:
“Would you like a coke?”
“Sure! What do you have?”
“Well, Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper,…”
Iowa is a “pop” state.
We had our Annual Trunk-or-Treat and had a tremendous turnout in our urban community. We had games, a Bounce House and an Obstacle Course (blowups), and of course, trunk-fulls of candy. We had our event on our sign for two weeks prior and had gone door-to-door on the Sunday Afternoon before Halloween. We gave out information about the church and engaged the parents while the kids played games and bounced around on the inflatables. We had well over 250 children show up (our church averages 80 on Sundays) so we are praying it will draw some folks to come on… Read more »
We went and nailed Luther’s 95 Theses on the door of the local RCC.
Camping, live music, Hebraic dancing, late night fire pits annually during Feast of Sukkot. No child cares about Christmas or Halloween anymore once they celebrate Sukkot! All year long they talk about Sukkot! Hanukkah takes second place even if parents choose to do gift giving or chocolate gelt.
Hebraic Dance might be a stumbling block to many Southern Baptists as it is easily confused with the excesses of the charismatic movement or conflicting with necessary sexy dancing prohibitions, but I love this stuff.
We had a “Hell House.” People from our church and the local community could wander through this old, abandoned house that is next to our property and be scared out of their wits by the collection of ghoulish and terrifying people in costumes. But since is was a Southern Baptist “Hell House”, here are the terrifying characters that entrants had to make their way past as they went through the house: Nameless, faceless, Baptist State Denominational Bureacrats who demanded money to put in a box marked “missions”, but actually took 70% of it and put it in their pockets and… Read more »
Brilliant! I would add one thing: a mirror somewhere in there where only the full extent of the entrant’s own sin was reflected back to them. That would be the most frightening to me.
Jim:
Thanks, Jim. That would truly be frightening.
I encourage our church to engage their neighborhoods, instead of bringing one neighborhood to us. As for me personally, I set up the projector and screen in our driveway, and put It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and Bugs Bunny’s Halloween favorites on repeat. I also made a large pot of chili, and as families came to our home the kids got candy and watched a little bit of animation, while we engaged adults with free chili and conversation. 3rd year in a row we have done it, and it gets better every year!