6 months from now, our holiday memories will be a jumbled collection of stories: who burned the Turkey Day pie at grandma’s house, reuniting with the whole family on Christmas Eve, or getting snowed-in for New Year’s. We won’t remember tiny details, but we’ll remember how the holidays made us feel.
Your church content should tell these same kinds of stories. Every event and celebration at your church has a unique feel to it––like how a festive party is different from a peaceful, candlelit service. Telling these stories is how you engage your members and encourage them to take part in the church family in the coming weeks!We’re highlighting 4 examples of churches finding creative ways to match the tone of their website content to the different events in their Christmas season. These engaging web pages give an authentic picture of what the holiday season there will be like; they tell the stories of what the church family might experience when they join in!
1. Advent Devotional
This simple resource from Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church is a great supplement to all of the community services a church provides during this time of year. This devotional gives members a personal, individual way to connect with Jesus during the holidays. Devotionals like this allow your members to personally celebrate Advent, but also be a part of a bigger community with other members of the congregation who are also reading along. The website page, itself, is very simple and straightforward––just like the devotional is for members and their families. The rest of their content also does a great job with Christmas events.
2. “Christmas Together”
With just a brief event description, we can practically hear the Trans Siberian Orchestra playing around us! This is the kind of memory-inducing content that is particularly moving around the holidays––it calls upon our own happy experiences, and moves us to join College Park Church at the concert. When we talk about using storytelling to engage your church, this is the type of living content we’re referring to: visceral, emotional, and drawing us in.
3. Christmas at Calvary
With so many events to promote at your church, you could consider following Calvary Church’s example with this seasonal events page. Instead of spreading many events out all over the whole website, Calvary lists all of this month’s events in one place. Not all of the celebrations are alike, though! (Candlelit services are presumably much different from the community Snow Day. Both sound really fun, though!) This seasonal listing gives members a way to get all of the information about holiday events at the same time.
4. “How to Have the Perfect Christmas”
Grace Church’s Christmas sermon series has a great name that grabs our attention instantly. We all dream of having the “perfect” Christmas, so this was a wonderful way to attract church website visitors with an emotional title. Grace’s description goes on to talk about how we won’t find perfection in every aspect of our holidays, but the sermons address God’s remedies to Christmas ailments.
This is the type of emotional draw that speaks to members and reminds us all to be humble and realistic during a season that isn’t always perfectly joyful for everyone.
