4 Tips to Prepare Your Church’s Best Mother’s Day Service Yet

For churches, Mother’s Day is one of the biggest opportunities of the year. In fact, next to Easter and Christmas, it may be your highest attended services. It may also be one of the times when you have the most non-Christians in the room.

People come to church to appease their moms (or bring their moms to honor and celebrate them), making this holiday a prime opportunity to share the gospel with non-believers.

But Mother’s Day is also obviously a time when churches generally want to make moms in their congregation feel valued and appreciated—without making other women feel unvalued.

You want to seize the opportunity for evangelism and make this service feel special. Here are four tips to help your church do that.

1. Find out what your moms want

There are tons of ways you can honor moms on Mother’s Day. But if you really want them to feel special, ask them what they want. Some moms may prefer to be surprised, or they may simply be happy to be acknowledged, but if you send out a survey to the moms in your congregation, you can learn where your energy will best be spent.

You could list out several ideas and ask them to rank them or indicate if they would like or dislike something. You could also leave it open-ended and see what they come up with. You might find some new ideas you never would’ve considered.

Or you might learn that moms really don’t want to stand up while everyone claps for them.

A survey may “spoil the surprise” for some people, but it also ensures that you know the best ways to make the most moms feel the most special, and it can help you avoid spending time on things people don’t appreciate or that don’t make them feel valued.

Alternatively, you could send a survey for kids and spouses to fill out so that they can tell you what you should do to honor their moms. This maintains the surprise and helps families feel like they’re “in on it.” And if some ideas will require a lot of prep, it can also double as a way for you to recruit volunteers.

2. Create invitations

For some people, it’s a lot easier to invite their friends and family to church if they have a physical invitation. Not only does it give them something to hand out, but physical invitations also serve as helpful reminders. People can put them on their fridge, the counter, or wherever they put things they want to remember.

Be sure to hand out your invitations weeks in advance so people have plenty of time to give them to friends and family. You might want to mail them out as well to maximize the number of members who are aware of your special service.

It’s also a good idea to use digital invitations. If you want people to think of Mother’s Day as a special service, you might consider creating an event in your app, or putting one together on Facebook. Facebook events are even easier to share than physical invitations, and it gives you an opportunity to cast the vision behind your service.

Plus, creating a digital event page helps you gauge interest and get a rough idea of how many people you might expect . . . just so long as you keep in mind: only a fraction of the people who RSVP to Facebook events actually show up.

3. Promote your service online

In addition to sending out invitations, you can use social media, email, or your church blog to increase awareness of your service. You could send out a video to tease what you’ll be doing, write a short devotional about motherhood, or even share some passages of Scripture that will be meaningful to moms.

The best part is your social media posts don’t even have to talk about your service to promote it—just by talking about Mother’s Day, you’ll get people thinking about your upcoming Mother’s Day service. (And some of your members will be grateful for the reminder.)

4. Set up push notifications

Push notifications are a handy feature of every church app. They let you message everyone who has the app, even when the app isn’t open (unless they’ve turned push notifications off). You can even create push notifications based on geolocation, meaning they send whenever someone with the app enters a specific geographic area . . . such as your campus.

You could send out a push notification a few days before your service, reminding your members to:

1. Show up
2. Invite friends and family
3. Plan something special for Mother’s Day

Again, some members will be very grateful for the reminder.

On the actual day of your service, you can set up a push notification that only sends to members with the app who arrive at your campus, reminding them to wish a mom happy Mother’s Day. This can be a great way to help your members see that they’re part of the welcoming, mother-honoring community you’re trying to create.

Are you ready for Mother’s Day?

For many families in your church, Mother’s Day is a happy holiday honoring someone they love. But not everyone feels that way about this day. Churches need to navigate the messy, sometimes painful associations people have with this holiday so that your congregation can continue being a refuge for the hurting and broken while also making moms feel loved.

Mother’s Day doesn’t take as much work as Easter, but be sure you plan ahead to make the most of this opportunity and thoughtfully approach conversations about motherhood.

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