Since Thanksgiving is usually a family event, we don’t recommend holding an event on Thursday.  We encourage our people who want to do something on Thanksgiving to volunteer at one of the food kitchens in the county.  We promote an event on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving called a “Night of Thanks”.  Like all of our outreach events, we do this free of charge and we will not accept donations of any kind.  What we use to attract people are “deep fried turkeys”.  We deep fry about 40 turkeys, ask people in the church to volunteer to bring in the trimmings, and we invite the community to come for dinner.

We have 400-500 people show up every year.  We eat dinner from 6:00 to 7:00 pm.  From 7:00 to 8:00 pm our contempporary worship team plays.  At 8:00 we provide dessert. We sort of keep the dessert hostage so people will stay and be a part of the concert.  This event takes a lot of volunteers and there is a cost associated with the turkeys (it costs about $1000 for the turkeys and peanut oil), but this event always adds new people to the church.

At Church Growth Consulting we are always looking for any good ideas you have for outreach so please send them along to us.  We hope that the Night of Thanks is a church growth idea you can use.