Forgive me for being out of the loop for a few days. My job can easily consume my time come this time of year. For many pastors it’s Easter Sunday, but for me it’s Palm Sunday; and the Egg Hunt that accompanies it every year. The church I work at here in Dallas had their 14th Annual World’s Largest Egg Hunt. Yours truly is responsible for the planning and organizing of this egg hunt, and my time has been monopolized for weeks preparing for it.
I try and do the egg hunt different than most other churches. First, we don’t do it on Easter or even the Saturday before. We have the stranglehold on Palm Sunday egg hunts, and we like it that way. Second, we make families come into our Sanctuary for a quick, I mean lightning quick, kid-friendly Easter service. It’s in this service that we play some super fun games with humongous beach balls, enjoy some music from our guest el trio De Hoy, I then do a real quick illustrated Easter sermon for the kids (which this year involved me making a Ice Cream sundae with ketchup, sardines, and a $100 bill…), and then we give away our door prizes. Our door prizes are bicycles, CD players, basketballs, remote control cars, and many other things. The entire ‘service’ totals 45-55 minutes long, so we get to the field as soon as possible.
Once the thousands get to the field, it’s amazing how quickly the kids pick up the candy eggs (individually wrapped). Lots of Fun!
A few details of our event this year:
- I know numbers matter to many, so in that regard it was a tremendous success. I estimate well over 3,000 in attendance.
- I had some excellent volunteers that helped me distribute over 20,000 flyers promoting the event. We call every elementary school within 10 miles of the church, and get an exact count. Then the Thursday before the event, we send out that exact number (in stacks of 30 so they can go in homeroom teachers boxes) to each school. Every year I get complaints from some parent, disgruntled that the church is advertising in their kids school; but I really don’t care. We have a good relationship with the schools in our area, and it’s not like there’s a lot of churches giving away as much as we do.
- We probably had over 200 volunteers for the event.
- el trio De Hoy was a GREAT success. In our area of Dallas, we draw about 80% Hispanic people for these kind of events, and they loved the music el trio De Hoy brought.
- Kids are the greatest audience for any kind of gross-out illustration. I couldn’t have planned their screams any better!
- Channel 8, WFAA, in Dallas picked up coverage of the event this year. It’s always fun to see your event get some publicity, and get to talk to the media about Jesus!
I know that there are some people that think we are the most terrible of churches for using an ‘Egg Hunt’ at Easter time. I know that we’re really taking something from the world, in that eggs aren’t exactly a part of the Easter story; but I like to think that because of all these candy eggs I got to tell over 3,000 people about Jesus!
For every year of my son’s life, we’ve attended the Texas Ranger’s opening day baseball game. I’m a huge baseball fan, and there is nothing quite like the excitement of Opening Day. We will both dress up in our Ranger jersey’s, buy some sunglasses, pack a bag full of fruit snacks, juice boxes and peanuts, and hit the ball field. Once we get past the super scary jet fly-over; Ryan is usually great. Great, meaning we make it to the 7th inning stretch before heading home.
