Easter Egg Hunt

Official Watermark Easter Egg Hunt Video from Watermark Freiburg on Vimeo.

As a finale to our Servolution, we held a city-wide Easter Egg Hunt.  We had 12,000 American easter eggs (had to be imported), which were filled with toys or candy.  Cornerstone Church in Blue Springs, MO, USA sent a team of willing volunteers that worked with our church to stuff eggs, prepare for the Easter Sunday Carnival and stuff mailboxes with nearly 8000 invitations. We had a lot of fun together!

After we setup for the Egg Hunt we watched as a few people trickled in here and there.  It was a bit disheartening at first... all that work for so little people.  But we knew this was what God wanted us to do.  About 15 minutes before the Egg Hunt was supposed to start people started coming in droves from all directions!  All told, we saw about 1000 people show up... over 500 kids!  It was amazing!!!

And the most significant part of the entire Easter Egg Hunt: at least 6 people came to Christ as a direct result.  And we have now gained a reputation in the community for being a church that gives with no strings attached... just like Jesus did!  A local school has even asked that we help them renovate some of their playground equipment because we've earned such a good reputation through serving.  It pays rich dividends to obey what God tells you to do!

You can see more info on our Servolution by checking out this post.

Servolution Challenge

Over the past month Watermark did a Servolution Challenge.  Robin and I had in our hearts to take personal finances (and that of a few of our friends) and give every adult that wanted to participate €40.  Their mission was to multiply it and go creatively serve our city.  We had 60 people accept the challenge!

We even got some positive press coverage from the regional newspaper (which is not normal for independent churches).  And at least two other churches (in other parts of Germany) and one nation-wide campus ministry are going to do their own version of our Servolution Challenge!

Here is a quick synopsis of SOME (not all) of the things they did:

• Gave Christmas presents, school supplies, books, clothes and house shoes to needy children.
• Gave an after school program craft supplies .
• Served volunteer firefighters breakfast.
• Presented nursing home residents with roses.
• Served staff NICU nurses breakfast.
• Baked goodies for local school teachers.
• Baked homemade cookies & muffins for a halfway house (last phase before their final release from prison) and then left flowers and 10 envelopes with IKEA gift certificates.
• Handed out chocolate to the homeless guys in the city.
• Took chocolate bars to the cleaning staff of the trains.
• Delivered toys, games, Hula hoops and sidewalk chalk for a program that works with children.
• Homeless people were given diapers, food and toiletries.
• Helped a single unemployed mother of 3 with train cards for her kids, household items and helped her find a job!
• Bought people at a homeless shelter groceries and household items.
• Bought cooking utensils and a vent for a youth home so the youth can cook without a smoke-filled room.
• Bought groceries for a known beggar who has 7 children to care for.
• Handed out free train tickets at the station.
• Put a case of Starbucks coffee in the fridge for hospital staff with encouraging sayings attached.
• One team went around the city and gave flower bouquets and Cokes to all of the toilet cleaning staff at the businesses and restaurants.
• Served a crowded refugee home by playing games with their children. They caught soap bubbles, drew w/sidewalk chalk, and painted. They talked with all of the parents and gave them coffee, chocolate, toys, pens and food.
• Gave out board games to non-profit group that volunteers to watch intercultural children after school.
• Gave a bag with bread, drink, eggs and flowers to a begging woman.
• Gave a man with a big hole in his leg a bag with food, antiseptic compresses and a train ticket home.
• Gave an unemployed shepherd a bag with dog food, some muffins and a drink.
• Served some “punks” soft drinks and cinnamon rolls.
• Gave workers of a special bus with a coke and some pretzels.
• Delivered a bag of dog food to another group of “punks” sitting with a dog.

Thanks to all those that gave and those that prayed!  Keep up the good work... you ARE making a HUGE difference!

A special thanks to Phil Burton and City Mission Kaiserslautern for helping birth this vision in us and for being cheerleaders along the way!

PS. As a grand finale we did a city-wide American Easter Egg Hunt for Freiburg.  More info & a video in our next post.

Don't get derailed!

Last Sunday we started our Servolution at Watermark.  For those that aren't familiar with this term, a Servolution is a church revolution through serving.  It fits perfectly one of our four core values: being missional and serving others with no strings attached.  In that service we gave 40 EUR to every teen and adult that committed to use it to serve someone that wouldn't or couldn't serve them in return.  God put it on our hearts months ago to do this, and we were happy to do so.

In the hopes of getting many people involved, we sought to create some buzz by posting many Facebook messages, and getting our team to do the same.

One of our staff members posted both a picture and a quick thought about it.  One of the guys that lives in her dorm posted a response to it on her Facebook Wall... he said it was a stupid idea and it was just a scam to make money.  She explained in more detail what we were trying to accomplish, and our heart to be a church that serves.  But he then posted a short clip from our initial fundraising video for the church launch (almost two years ago)... one in which I gave the expected budget and asked for people to get involved.  She was so upset that she removed his comment from her Wall and continued the conversation with him privately.

It was really frustrating to us... we took out over 3500 EUR from our personal savings (and some donations from three of our close friends in the USA) to make this happen (including our kids' tuition and next month's rent).  And here was someone with absolutely no clue trashing what we had put our heart and soul into.  Robin made the statement: "We PAY a lot of money just for the privilege of pastoring this church!"

But God reminded me of something my mentor says, "It's the guy with the football that everyone wants to tackle."  We have to understand that if we try to get out of the box and shake things up, there WILL be opposition!  Small people with small dreams will always try to crush the big dreams of others.  That shouldn't ever stop us (or even slow us down) in our pursuit of God's purpose for our lives.

I saw this so clearly a few years ago... in 2 Samuel 5:17 it says that as soon as David saw the realization of his God-given dream of becoming king, their enemies - the Philistines - brought their entire army to wipe him off the face of the planet.  There will always be opposition.  And the bigger the dream, the greater the opposition.


In the end this whole thing only made us more determined to do what God has called us to do.  We don't have time to worry about our critics or what others would say.  We need to stay on task: reaching the unreached of Freiburg and helping them find and fulfill their purpose in God's plan.

My encouragement to you today... don't let the opinions of others or their belittling comments derail you from pursuing God and taking risks for Him.  There is much to be done and little time to do it!
May God strengthen your heart and bless the effort you put into finding and completing His mission for your life!

Launch Brochure

Because we have a number of church planters asking us about how we started, I thought I'd post our pre-launch fundraising brochure. We had this professionally produced. Feel free to use any of the ideas in this brochure... just as we have borrowed ideas from other friends that have successfully planted churches.

Yes, it cost a lot to print this (the initial printing cost was about $2.00 per brochure), but one of the marketing points Robin always makes is that you've got to spend money to make money. We eventually figured out how to get it printed for less than $1.00 per brochure, but it took some research and a lot of favor with a printing company manager.

The point is that serious investors are used to having something professional in their hands to look at and think about (and pray about). The more professionally done it is, the more it captures their attention. And the more it presents us as legitimate church planters that have the ability to succeed... a cause worthy of their consideration.

No one wants to invest in a losing cause. They want a return on their investment, even if that return is souls won into the Kingdom of God and churches planted.

We ended up printing about 350 of these and handing them out to pastors and people that had the ability to give sizable donations.

Please don't misunderstand me... we handed something to everyone that showed interest in supporting our church launch. But our relatives and friends didn't need a fancy brochure to convince them that we were legitimate. They just needed to be able to get to the information, which was already online in the form of a website. We had sharp business cards printed up with the relevant contact information and website address on them.

The brochure below is just a web-friendly version. Click on the link at the bottom to download or see the high-quality version.

Click here to view the high-quality version, or right click here to download this brochure (choose Save as...)

How to promote your church launch (the cheap way)

When it came time to launch the church, we came up with a postcard that exemplified the brand that we wanted - rock-n-roll and coffee.  We borrowed from someone else's design idea and made our own version.

And we approached handing out the postcards in two ways...

* We stuffed 4500 mailboxes in our neighborhood (not illegal in Germany, but labor-intensive)

* Our team handed out 1000 postcards downtown during orientation week at Freiburg University

We found that people are more willing to take them if you have a group handing them out (five or so people in the same area)… then it doesn't seem so "cult-like".  And we give them a small piece of chocolate as well (the mini chocolate bars that you get at IKEA are cheap). Everyone wants free chocolate! I just tell people, "Schocki [Schokolade]… umsonst!" or "Free chocolate!"  It helps if you approach it positively, as if they should take the chocolate because it's free.  If you act as if you know you're bothering them, they will avoid you like the plague!

When they look at the postcard (which I have turned face down so they aren't freaked out by the word "Kirche" [church] on the front), I tell them it's just an invitation to join us for our grand opening. We want to get the word out and free chocolate is the easiest way to do so.

Then if people ask about the church, I tell them the reason we are giving something with no strings attached is that we want to be the kind of church that represents the Jesus of the Bible… He always gave with no strings attached.

It's important to note that we also used targeted Facebook ads, which were successful for brand recognition.  This cost us more, but placed our logo and an ad in front of hundreds of thousands of Freiburg-area young adults.  By setting our "click through" rate high, our ad was the first one that our target audience saw when they logged on to Facebook.


We experimented with different wording on the ads to see which were most effective in getting click throughs.  American Pastor seemed to generate the most clicks.  When they clicked on our ad, they were redirected to a "landing page" on our website that promoted the church launch service in German and English.

Spring

Spring is my favorite time of year.  Winter is usually cold and dark in Germany.  The days are extremely short and dark.  But, in Spring and Summer, the scenery is so beautiful in the Black Forest, and this part of the country is known to be the sunniest (and therefore, the friendliest) part of Germany.  

The reason that this is my favorite season is not only the weather and flowers, but Easter! Jesus’ birth is celebrated at Christmas.  It’s a wonderful time that I feel we have really turned into something other than a celebration of Jesus.   But, Easter….it’s a celebration of just Him and what he did on the cross for us!  Not only did Jesus live a perfect life day after day, year after year, but after 33 years of this perfect life….he gave it up for us!  At Easter, he paid the ultimate price.  God paid the ultimate price for us, the riff raff of society. 

Jesus was beaten beyond recognition of even looking like a man- so we could have healthy bodies.  His blood that poured out at the cross was to make sure that we could be forgiven….that we could experience the unbelievable joy of being in the very presence of His father!  Jesus knew that if he sacrificed himself for us, that it would produce a harvest of believers that would span the course of time.  

On Easter, we celebrate when Jesus rose from the grave.  When he rose, he gave us hope!  I LOVE THIS SEASON!  It makes me cry every time I think of Jesus’ sacrifice and the joy in His resurrection!  He layed down everything for us…so that we could enjoy everything that God had given to Him!  That’s what the season means for me.  

People are so open to the things of God at Christmas and Easter.  Let’s tell everyone we know!   

Robin

Watermark Easter

We are going to have a huge Easter egg hunt and festival (carnival) for the at-risk kids in our neighborhood this Easter.  We are going to tell them about what Jesus did for them through eggs, juggling, carnival booths, clowns and balloons. Our church is in the middle of what we would call "the projects".  There are so many cultures represented in this area because of the large immigrant population. I can't wait to see what God will do with this outreach!