Last year for Easter our church invited thousands to attend the movie "The Passion of the Christ." We also sent invitations to thousands to attend our Maundy Thursday: Passover Seder Service, the Good Friday Service, an Easter egg hunt on Saturday, and of course, our Easter Celebration Service on Sunday morning. It was the Easter egg hunt that showed itself as the most vital part of our outreach strategy.

When the thought of an egg hunt first occurred to me, my immediate reaction was analogous to Peter's reaction when the Lord challenged him to go to the Gentile home of Cornelius (Acts 10). I did not want our church to be associated with something that I considered at the time to be a pagan perversion of our sacred Easter observances.

But I firmly believe that Christians need to engage the culture and we need to find effective ways to help unbelievers consider the claims of Christ. And the eggs worked to do just that.

Here are our numbers from last year's efforts:

In terms of putting us in direct contact with unchurched individuals, the Easter egg hunt had the greatest draw. Now I understand the Easter egg is not what Easter is all about. Easter is about engaging the culture with the claims of Christ and his resurrection. So we are not putting all our evangelistic eggs in the Easter egg hunt basket. The Easter egg hunt is just a part of our overall outreach strategy. It is putting us in contact with unbelievers so that we can establish a point of contact and build long term relationships with a view toward reaching them for Christ. Do you want to guess what our Easter outreach strategy will look like this year? Here it is:

                    Sunday: Easter Celebration Service

In addition, we are launching a new and improved outreach program that is built upon the key components of prayer and evangelistic contacts that will be administered through our Sunday school/small groups.

Please understand, my purpose in writing this article was not to convince you that your need to have an Easter egg hunt this year. Rather, my intent was simply to challenge you to prayerfully evaluate each component of your outreach strategy.

An Easter egg hunt was not a part of our original plan when we developed our strategy last year. As I fasted and prayerfully considered the promotion of our strategy, I felt impressed to consider incorporating an Easter egg hunt into the strategy.

We already had a lot of stuff going on and I was not too enthusiastic about taking on another major effort. In addition, I reasoned with the Lord that the city recreation department, a few other organizations and churches sponsor Easter egg hunts in the community. Some of the venues are so massive in size that I thought surely no one would want to come to our small church effort. Besides, we don't have the money, manpower and resources to pull it off well, I complained. I agreed however, that if God would show me that he really wanted us to sponsor and Easter egg hunt, then I would incorporate it into our strategy.

Guess what happened? A huge supply of candy and other goods were donated to our church. It seemed the Lord was leading. We asked for donations of plastic Easter eggs and were given over 500 in just a few weeks time. A mission group within the church immediately stepped up and offered to stuff the plastic eggs and help organize the effort. Then, just days prior to our event, a local collegiate ministry donated over 500 already stuffed Easter eggs which were in surplus from their Easter egg hunt outreach event on campus. It seemed God definitely had his hand on the idea.

Another confirmation came from a man I met who had not attended church in years until the egg hunt. He told me the city's egg hunt was too massive and chaotic but that he would definitely be back for the one our church sponsored.

What has the egg hunting experience taught me? At least three things: 1) The Lord will help us establish meaningful contact with the unchurched if we simply ask him to help us do so. But we must be willing to follow his guidance. 2) A small church can sponsor an effective outreach event, even if other groups in the community are providing a similar event on a grand scale, provided of course that the Lord leads you to do so. 3) Unchurched people are at different stages of receptivity and some of them will come to a church-sponsored event. You simply have to prayerfully discover what type of event they will most likely to respond to and offer various events appealing to people at various stages.

Would you believe we already have more than 1,000 plastic Easter eggs donated for this year's event? We haven't even requested donations yet. As you can imagine, we are planning an even bigger, better and more effective event than we sponsored in 2004.

Do your have an Easter outreach strategy? If so, is it putting you and your congregation in direct contact with unbelievers? Are they being confronted with the claims of Christ in a manner that is commensurate with their level of receptivity to the gospel and your church? If not, pray and ask God to help you discover effective ways and means to engage the culture. He will answer your prayer as you look to him for guidance.

Clark Killingsworth is pastor of College Avenue Baptist Church in Normal, Ill. He is available for consulting in the areas of church health, strategic planning and church growth and can be reached at cskillingsworth@juno.com.