Church Planting, Superheroes, and Chicken Wings

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I had an absolute blast today!  I'm not just saying that to put some positive spin on a day that really sucked…I really had a great time!  As you may know, The Courageous Church is launching in downtown Atlanta in about 75 days with our Grand Opening @ Center Stage and until then we are trying to create as much buzz and goodwill throughout the city as possible.  We feel like we did that today in a MAJOR way!

Before I say anything else – I want to tell the world that our volunteers today were the bomb!  We were there for nearly 10 hours and they served people with a smile and held cheerful conversations about our church with total strangers over and over and over again.  If it's true that you can tell how much God loves you by the quality of the people He surrounds you with, I am so outrageously blessed that I just don't know what to say!  Thank you all for doing such an awesome job on so many levels.

Today we were the first and only church to ever host a tailgating tent @ the Morehouse/Spelman College Homecoming game.  With nearly 15,000 people in attendance, a huge soundstage with some awesome artists, and dozens of vendors selling high priced food and drinks, we decided to enter the fray with a tent full of food and goodies of our own…except we gave away all of our food and PEOPLE LOVED IT!

Between the fact that times are tough right now and about half of our tent visitors were broke college students, people were extremely grateful for what we offered and I'll be honest – it felt good to provide it.  Doing random acts of kindness is a part of our church strategy – and although this was far from random on our part – it was random for the 1,000 people we fed today that totally weren't expecting it!

We made a strategic decision to offer this event to create buzz and goodwill in the city.  From renting the space, buying an outdoor tent and tables, purchasing the food, getting a huge 4×10 banner (that's the graphic for it), getting some t-shirts for our volunteers, and paying for our big surprise, we spent about $2,000 on the event and I feel very strongly that this was a much better value than sending out a rather small mailer and let me tell you why.

• We served FREE food (chicken wings) to nearly 1,000 people (basically until we ran out of food).
• We asked people to fill out simple contact information forms in exchange for the food (no one fussed or complained at all).
• We asked people on the forms if they would like prayer and additional information on our church.
• The overwhelming majority of people answered yes to both.
• We passed out flyers to nearly 4,000 people.
• We will immediately create a database and follow up with every single contact that we gathered today.

Because we are trying to build our name as a church that DOES good work, we wanted our first major effort to be more than words, more than a promise to do good later, and more than a piece of paper, we want people to see us DOING good work and doing it well.  A few of you asked what we could have done differently and I would say a few small things.

• We chose to use a very simple, glossy flyer that we already had a huge amount of.  We were good stewards for using those today, but I would have liked to have a new, more informative flyer.
• We needed a few extra utensils and napkins today that we didn't have.
• We didn't have a designated camera person and only got a few images taken because we were all working so doggone hard.
• Our chicken wings weren't hot (temperature) and a few people wanted them to be warmer.

Ultimately though, if we don't hurry up and follow up effectively with the people we met today, we won't fully realize our return on investment.  No matter what we created a ton of buzz and excitement and built up the strength of our launch team, but we certainly hope that we can translate our hard work today into some changed lives through our church in the future.

OH YEAH!  I almost forgot.  Our biggest hit might not have been the free food (we also gave away pom poms to kids for the football game), but it was probably our VERY SPECIAL GUESTS!

I've been pumping up for months that we had 5 INSANE, SHOCKING, AMAZING GUESTS and they did not disappoint.  Since we're The Courageous Church, we had some of the most courageous people in the world with us today passing out flyers for the church…

Spiderman
Superman
Captain America
Wonder Woman
and…a very popular political candidate whose name rhymes with Yo Momma!

We laughed our butts off when we saw some of our team in the costumes.  People were taking tons of pictures, (most) kids loved them, and it was a pretty doggone affordable way for us to garner a WHOLE LOT of attention in a very busy, loud setting.  We kept the costumes and will use them until they fall apart!

We'll post some more photos soon! These are Twitpics that I took with my phone.

Thank all of you that prayed for our time today!  It means a lot to me.  Keep praying…we have a lot more up our sleeves!