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If you’re tired of doing it all yourself and you want to get some fresh volunteers along with fresh ideas, hosting a Planning Party is the way to go.
The Planning Party system we teach has been used by tons of churches with great results. Including better dates that stick, more volunteers, and increased participation.
Planning Parties are a great way to:
- Plan your entire year in 1 evening
- Involve new volunteers in plans they are invested in
- Increase all-church support and vision for your ministry area
Listen in to learn the 6 steps to Planning Party success, how to avoid the most common mistakes, and a few insider tips for your best year ever.
Links Mentioned:
Blog posts about Planning Parties:
Your Best Ever Women’s Ministry Planning Party
5 Steps To A Youth Ministry Kick-Off Event!
Check out our Ministry Bundles:
Women’s Ministry Bundle
Children’s Ministry Bundle
Youth Ministry Bundle
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Listen On:
Laurie Graham 0:01
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry podcast.
Laurie Graham 0:14
Hey, welcome back to the Small Church Ministry Podcast. If you haven’t been waiting for it, this is the episode you didn’t know you needed, but you’re going to love it! We’re going to talk about everything planning party, at least everything I can cover in about half an hour.
Laurie Graham 0:31
Now, we have story upon story upon story that comes out in our Facebook community when we have our live events, people talking all about the planning parties. And my daughter reminded me recently that I have never done an actual dedicated episode to planning parties. So this is what you’re going to get here. I’m going to tell you why you need a planning party, how it can help your church ministry. I’m going to share some testimonies of what people have found with the planning parties. I’m going to give you the clear steps to make planning parties work, and also several resources that can help you pull this together.
Laurie Graham 1:03
If you are a regular listener of the podcast, you’ve probably heard me mention planning parties. I’ve talked about it when we talk about starting new ministries from scratch or restarting them. I’ve mentioned it when we talk about not doing ministry to people but with them. We’ve talked about planning parties for recruiting new volunteers and building your teams. But today, I’m going to outline exactly what you need, how a planning party works, and what’s going to make it super successful.
Laurie Graham 1:30
To start off with a few testimonies, I literally just went into our huge Facebook community and I did a little search for planning parties. These are not in any particular order. Literally, these just popped up. And if I scroll, there will be tons more, but here are some stories that have come out of our Facebook community.
Laurie Graham 1:47
Lisa Hodges wrote, “We had our church-wide planning party today. For us, the biggest boost was getting a point person for each event. For the past two years, the planning has fallen to my husband and I. We have a lot of good encouragement and energy, and from the ideas, we can see what direction the ministry should focus on and take this year.”
Laurie Graham 2:09
Kenya Williams said this, “We held our women’s ministry planning party last week using the four-week plan. We did an open invitation to all women in church 18 years and older. We advertised it as a night to come fellowship and share ideas for the women’s ministry. We had 24 ladies of various ages attend. Many were women who are not currently plugged in and connected to any team or small group and only attend Sunday worship. We started as a committee of three, but at the meeting, we extended the invitation for women to join us in planning upcoming events for the year. And we had three more volunteer to help.” Is that not awesome?
Laurie Graham 2:46
When people talk about bringing in women who are not usually plugged in, or people who only come on Sundays and involving them, it just gets my heart going. Okay, here are a couple more.
Laurie Graham 2:56
Maribel Miller posted several pictures and she said, “Here are a few pics of our women’s ministry planning party last Friday. It was a total success. Thank you, Jesus.” Just love that.
Laurie Graham 3:06
Khaleesi Wilcox posted this. She said, “I have to give a huge shout-out for planning parties. We had our second harvest party planning party this year, which is at the beginning of October, and I was so surprised that people were so on board simply because they remembered or they missed out on last year’s planning party. I strongly suggest having planning parties when you’ve been doing everything yourself.” See, this is like a way to get more people involved.
Laurie Graham 3:32
Planning parties can be used for youth ministry, women’s ministry, all-church ministry, so many ways to do it.
Laurie Graham 3:38
Just a couple more little testimonies. Brittany Fox said, “I purchased the youth ministry bundle when it was on sale during anniversary week. We just had our planning party last night. I think it went really well. So many awesome ideas. God is doing big things in our little church.”
Laurie Graham 3:53
And just one more: Jessie Manzi has held a planning party for the past four years. I remember when she posted she had her first one. And she said, “Here it is, my annual thank you for the pizza and planning party post. This was year four for us. The first year in 2020, I had three kids. This year, our annual planning party and New Year’s Eve lock-in started with 15 kids.” She said, “This year I added ‘what are we going to study’ portion to the event in the evening. So now I’ve practically our entire year completely planned. Thank you ever so much.”
Laurie Graham 4:29
So these are just shout-outs of people in our community who have used this concept of having a planning party. Again, there are so many more stories to share, especially with people who’ve done all-church planning parties where they have the different teams combined, like women and men and outreach and prayer and worship and leadership, all doing a planning party together.
Laurie Graham 4:49
This concept of a planning party, as I mentioned, we’re going to break it down. You can use it in kids ministry, youth ministry, women’s ministry, outreach, as I mentioned, all-church, any ministry areas that do event planning, or even programming like teaching, like small groups.
Laurie Graham 5:07
We have tons of resources that support the planning party concept; we will drop them in the show notes. There are several episodes in the podcast that kind of touched on it. But really, there are a couple of free blog posts you may want to check out. One is called “Five Steps to a Youth Ministry Kickoff Event.” These have concepts in it again, that can be used far beyond youth ministry. There’s another post on the website called “Your Best Ever Women’s Ministry Planning Party.” A lot of people resource that too. And you probably heard from the testimonies that our ministry bundles also have them included; we’ll make sure to drop that in the show notes.
Laurie Graham 5:42
So before I get into the six steps to planning a successful planning party, I just want to go over why you would want this: if you are tired of doing everything yourself, you want to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 5:56
If it’s the same people doing the same things all the time, you want to do a planning party. If you’re trying to connect different people—maybe some who are involved and some who aren’t, or you’ve got that generational break where the older women are involved but not the younger ones, or the other way around—you want to do a planning party. If you’re tired of doing ministry for people and having them not show up, or they say they want these events and then they don’t come, you want to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 6:29
Planning parties help paint the vision of what you’re about. But they’re including people in a way that others are part of the vision. You will get more volunteers, you’ll grow more supporters, people will be more excited, there’s more momentum. Another great reason to do a planning party is when you’re doing an all-church planning party, if you feel like different ministries are competing for dates, or you could do so much more if you were on the same page. Another great reason to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 6:55
The last reason is, they are just crazy fun. They can just be a really great time, build a lot of community as well. But they’re also super effective; you can get an entire year of your events planned out in one night. And the goal is to leave with a point person who is either in charge of or partnering with each of the different events. So there are so many great blessings that come out of this, and even those side benefits that you didn’t even plan for. So let me get into the six steps for a successful planning party.
Laurie Graham 7:26
The first one is this: you’ve got to choose the best time and date for the planning party, which means you should not pick this date by yourself. You want to look at the people that you want to involve, which is going to be a very, very wide net; we’ll talk a little bit about that. Not just your core volunteers, or the people that you think will care. You want to look at some really great dates. Look at some key people that you would love to make sure they can come.
Check with them before you set the date. I don’t know if this has happened to you; I’m going to guess it probably has. It’s happened to me numerous times over 30 years of ministry: I plan a date, and I totally missed that somebody from the church was graduating that day, or had a party that day, or there was a sports event or a community event. And all of a sudden, you’ve got this amazing thing planned, but the date and time are terrible. We do not want that to happen for your planning party.
Laurie Graham 8:22
The next thing: you do want to evaluate last year before your next planning party. Now, this can be done with a small group of people. I never liked doing anything in ministry alone, so I would definitely loop in some people. If you don’t have a team, other ministry leaders. If you don’t have other ministry leaders, some people who have been involved on and off. But you really want to look at what happened, like the vision, the goals that you are really looking toward.
You kind of want to evaluate based on if those purposes are met, not just, “Oh, we had six people at this small group,” or, “We had this many people at these events.” Are they actually fulfilling the purpose of the events that you had? Are your studies drawing people deeper? How are things going? Another reason why you want to kind of look at last year before your planning party is you really want to look ahead to where you want to go. And we’re not going to be looking ahead until we look at where we are. So, bring God into that vision, like, “Where could we go?” and have that in mind before you have this planning party.
Laurie Graham 9:20
The next thing: you do want to evaluate last year before your next planning party. Now, this can be done with a small group of people. I never liked doing anything in ministry alone, so I would definitely loop in some people. If you don’t have a team, other ministry leaders. If you don’t have other ministry leaders, some people who have been involved on and off. But you really want to look at what happened, like the vision, the goals that you are really looking toward.
You kind of want to evaluate based on if those purposes are met, not just, “Oh, we had six people at this small group,” or, “We had this many people at these events.” Are they actually fulfilling the purpose of the events that you had? Are your studies drawing people deeper? How are things going? Another reason why you want to kind of look at last year before your planning party is you really want to look ahead to where you want to go. And we’re not going to be looking ahead until we look at where we are. So, bring God into that vision, like, “Where could we go?” and have that in mind before you have this planning party.
Laurie Graham 10:27
The next thing is, you want to promote your planning party in a really different way than you’ve ever promoted anything before. Because if you think about it, like how many church announcements are happening every Sunday, on your slides, in your newsletter, in your emails? This has to stand out in such a different way because you want a lot of people to come, not just your core. And one of the testimonies I read earlier out of the Facebook group said they had people who were totally on the outside, the people who were just kind of coming to church, had never been involved, came to the planning party.
Now, how did that happen? I’m going to tell you, it is because it was promoted in a way that made these people who never come to anything think, “Oh, this will be different.” It has to be different. It can’t look like your normal events. It can’t look like one more women’s ministry planning thing. It can’t look like one more outreach planning meeting. It’s got to look different. So you want to promote this planning party really, really wide. You want to invite everyone who even can kind of touch into this ministry area, because this is how you start doing ministry with people instead of for them. It’s very fun, it’s very active, and people will be heard.
Laurie Graham 11:50
Okay, the next thing about the planning party is you want to set up your room well. You’ve got to think “party”—you don’t want it to look exactly the same as when everybody else comes in. The fun thing is, if you follow all of our notes and the way that we talk about setting up planning parties, you’re going to have some cool stuff on the walls. You’re going to have some calendar pages up, you’re going to have brightly colored Post-it notes, brightly colored pens, you’re going to have a lot of fun stuff going on in the room. So if you do follow all our outlines, it’s really great. You want people to be sitting at small group tables, like tables for four to six people. If you have a micro church, which you’re not alone—tons of people who follow us have churches of under 50—you may only need one table or two tables. That’s totally fine.
But you don’t want more than four to six people at each table group. You want table groups set up, and you want a happy facilitator at each one of those groups. So again, one table is fine, but if you’ve got more than four to six people, you’re going to want more tables set up. Food and drinks are so important; make it welcoming. Please don’t serve a crazy meal, though; you don’t want to take away the time. The planning party agenda is pretty tight, and if you spend half an hour eating, you will lose the time that you need. People don’t want to come to things that are longer than 90 minutes max. We actually set up planning parties to be like 75 minutes, an hour and 15 minutes, 90 minutes max. So don’t plan on doing a whole meal because it will cut into your time and you’re not going to like that at all. So you definitely want to follow and set up your room really well.
Laurie Graham 13:36
And then you want to be really intentional. This is step number six. We have straight-up agendas that are planned. You can find it in the free post. You can find variations of it in a lot of our different resources. But you want to be really intentional with these timed segments. They are on purpose. If you’ve ever been to a ministry meeting, you’ve probably seen tangents start, or rabbit trails, maybe even some complaining, or perhaps some conversations that should happen later, maybe some criticism, or just some way-off ideas that take all the attention away. We have the agenda set up really intentionally to follow through. Now, it can feel a little annoying, with a timer and a bell. If that bothers you, we really want you just to love it, fall in love with it, embrace it, because there are reasons for every little detail we have in there. You want to keep on track and you want to be intentional.
Laurie Graham 14:34
So now that I gave you the general six steps: choose a great time and date, choose a party leader or an emcee, the third one was evaluate last year before the next planning party, make sure you have a great promotional plan to extend very, very wide, number five was setting up the party room well, and number six is being really intentional with all these segments. Now I’m going to briefly run through how a planning party is run, a little bit of why it happens the way it does, and why we’ve planned it this way. And then we’ll talk about a few big mistakes that I would love for you to avoid, and then we’ll kind of wrap up. So the planning party agenda is planned on purpose in order. If you’ve never done it before, we just really suggest you follow it straight through. If you’re used to this type of meeting, and you want to kind of morph it or tailor it to your group, feel free to do that. But if you’ve never done one of these, please embrace what we have first. You know, that’s one of those things with learning, right? You learn a system from somebody, and once you put it together, you can kind of tailor it. But don’t throw out the system until you’ve tried it, because I promise you it works.
Laurie Graham 15:46
So you’re going to start out with some welcome and introductions. If you already know everybody, I totally get that; most of us do, we’re in small churches. But I want to tell you that sometimes we miss this welcome time. It’s really important. It’s almost like a little bit of a downshift from your day. Everybody’s walking into a meeting or a planning party with whatever has happened to them in that day, whether it’s early or late. And when you can do like welcome and introductions with a little bit of a mixer game—we love the candy mixer game as the one we suggest for the planning party—it just kind of breaks down that, I don’t know, just the baggage we’re walking in with. It’s almost like a, it’s just a shift into a new mode. So we really recommend that you do a real quick mixer type game, even if everybody knows each other.
Laurie Graham 16:37
The second part is just sharing a little bit of your vision and goals. Because your goal for the day is to walk out of here with an entire year of core events on the calendar. This might shock people, if you think about how we usually plan and how it’s belabored and how it gets very stressful, or people are doing it behind closed doors, right? That’s how usually it happens. There’s a ministry team, a core team that plans things, and then everybody else hears about it later. What you’re saying is, “Together as a group, we are going to plan the year.” It is so different, it is so motivating. You do want to share a little bit of your vision and mission to get people excited. If you embrace the ministry funnel, you might want to share that. If there’s some new value that you’re trying to enter in, or if you have a new vision for the community, you may want to share that before you get going. But that’s really short; it’s like five to 10 minutes total.
Laurie Graham 17:33
Then you’re going to enter a time of individual brainstorming. Now you’ve got to stay with me on this: it’s got to be individual. I want you to think of a typical church meeting where the people who talk a lot or have the strongest opinions are heard. And other people either add their opinions or other people shut down, or people are getting interrupted, or people are just kind of, they’re just not even going to share. One of the beauties of the planning parties is we want to hear from everyone. If you want to hear from everyone, that doesn’t happen out loud with voices; it often happens in different ways. So the individual brainstorming session is five to seven minutes. And this is where everybody gets a pen and a Post-it note. When the timer starts, you give people a few minutes just to write down as many ideas as they have for whatever you are planning, on a Post-it note, individually, with no talking.
Again, there are very clear instructions in the blog post that I mentioned; you’re going to want to look it up if you’ve never done anything like that. But the goal is to come up with as many ideas as we can. Now, if you’ve been in a place where you say, “I’ve asked people for their ideas, and they don’t give me any,” I want to tell you the main reason why is because all of us have grown up in a society, a system, a family, a school, any kind of setting where we share an idea, and somebody tells us, “That’s a wrong idea,” or “It’s a stupid idea,” or “That idea won’t work.” Do you know how many ideas people have shared over the course of history that get answered with the response, “That won’t work?” It’s very common. That’s why we’re not doing that here. We’re just writing tons of ideas on Post-it notes. And we’re not going to tell anybody that it’s not going to work. So if you take this five to seven minutes to write ideas on Post-it notes, you are going to have a huge amount of ideas, all sitting on Post-it notes individually. Your goal is to keep the energy positive. All kinds of stuff we’re getting, you’re going, you’re letting people know, “Just anything goes! Anything goes!” Write one idea on each note.
Laurie Graham 19:46
After the individual brainstorming time is up, then you get to talk together as a table group. If you have several different tables, you’re just talking as table groups; you’re not talking as the large group. If you do have a large group, you’ll bring it back and share different ideas from the large group. Now, during this time, you have not slimmed down a number of ideas into small ideas. You are not judging anything. This entire time we are celebrating every idea that comes up, whether or not you’ve tried it before, whether or not you think it’s good. We literally are celebrating the number of ideas that have happened. Now what you will see if you do this well, if you’ve got an emcee and a party leader, and people are on board, you will start seeing the mood in the room change from “I don’t know if my ideas are good. I’m scared to share.
The leaders always plan everything,” to “I’ve got something to share! How fun is this? Let’s keep going!” After all these ideas are out, I’m going to tell you, you could have 100 ideas on Post-it notes, you could have more than that, you could have 30. But you will have more ideas if you follow this system than you’ve ever had before. So after that, you’re going to take a few minutes to organize them into categories. Now, you should probably have a few different categories in mind before you get started. These might vary in your church, though. So you may have subgroups like sports events, outdoor events, community events, events with food. Sometimes when I’ve done planning parties, I haven’t really done categories until I watch what people are writing, especially if you’re doing this with a youth group. Because oftentimes, as they’re writing, you’ll see, “Oh, that kind of gets grouped together; this group wants to travel,” right? But however it comes out, you do want to organize them in categories, because you’ll start seeing doubles, you’ll start seeing duplicates, you’ll start seeing where there’s a lot of energy. And organizing them in categories will help kind of boil it down to where you want to be picking.
Laurie Graham 21:52
We’re almost done. Are you already having fun just listening to me, because this can be a hoot!
Laurie Graham 21:58
The next thing you’re going to do is choose top events. I love to call this sticker time. So I always get a whole bunch of stickers and I give everybody a certain number of stickers, and they get to vote on the top ideas that they want. Sometimes you’ll have them vote for 20 ideas, maybe you’ll have them vote for five; it depends on your numbers and the goals of your event. But we’re not going to pick everything that gets voted for, and we’re not even going to necessarily pick the one that has the most votes. But what this does is it lets you see where there is energy, where people are excited, even in the categories—what people are excited about. When I’ve done this for youth groups or children’s ministry, I’ve actually given them special stickers, and I’ve made them vote in a certain category, like they can vote on all the events, but they need to put five stickers in the area of service projects or service events.
Because sometimes, as I mentioned, you may be coming in with a goal of, you know, we really want to develop more outreach in our community, it’s part of our family ministries, or intergenerational. And so you may have all these ideas, and only some of them are reaching out in the community. And so it’s okay to say, “Hey, we really want to make sure you hit a few in this category. So don’t miss this category.” As I mentioned, these Post-it notes, when you read some of the articles that I’ve mentioned, it gives you a little more detail. But when you do the categories, I love to put them usually on a wall. And so I’ll take some painter’s tape and put sections on a wall, or maybe you’ve got a bulletin board or a whiteboard or something that you’re using. But then the Post-it notes go up on the wall in the different categories. This also gets people up and moving. Another great thing when you’re having a party, you don’t want to just sit at a table, right? You want to be able to have some movement. It helps people think and it also just breaks up some of the complacency of sitting in one space.
Laurie Graham 23:56
So then after that, you’re going to kind of wrap up. Sometimes it’s really great to put a little break in here. If you’ve got a team that’s a leadership team or some people who are rising up to kind of help a little bit, you might need a little breather in there to kind of look at everything and assess, you know, where do we want to go with this? Typically, what I like to share is that you choose one event, if you’re doing women’s ministry, outreach ministry, children’s ministry, men’s ministry, anything that’s kind of like an event-type of ministry. Choose just one monthly event and put it on the calendar, during your planning party, before you leave.
Laurie Graham 24:35
These can be the simple things. They don’t have to be the “Oh my gosh, let’s do a mission trip to Haiti.” You might not want to put that on your calendar this year. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to do it, right? All these ideas are great. It is really important to say to people, “These ideas are great. We might not do them all this year. But what we do want to do is choose 12 events, something that we came up with today, right here and now with you all. We’ll do one a month for the next year. Put them on the calendar.”
Laurie Graham 25:07
Now you can work together and help to kind of move and shape this in a way that it is feasible for you. But there will be 12 events that are easy events that will be successful, that don’t take a lot of prep. Now, if you’ve got a team there, and they’re ready to go, and they are all about doing this auction fundraiser for the youth to go on their mission trip, that’s great. But if not, you’re going to want to choose events that fit how much planning and prep that you have to give within your capacity. You can think about costs.
Laurie Graham 25:44
A lot of times when this starts happening, when you start choosing with the entire group, people will rise up and say, “I would love to be part of that! If you did that, I will totally help to organize that.” And that’s what I’ve always done at the planning parties is play around the Post-it IDs until you have logical dates, until you have one volunteer at least who’s going to be a contact or organizer or even head up one event per month. You want to leave this planning party with a calendar that already has dates chosen.
Laurie Graham 26:18
Now, there’s a lot of reasons for that, I’m going to get into that a little bit when I talk about some of the biggest mistakes that people can make. And I shouldn’t even say mistakes, I should just say, if you did this differently, it would come out better. And having somebody or a team of people who are actually kind of stepping up to say, “Hey, I’d love to help with that one. I’d love to help with that one,” it’s actually really important. If no one is excited about an idea that you’re putting on a calendar, no one’s stepping up saying, “Oh, I’d like to even be part of that,” I really would table that event for the future. It might be a great event, but let’s table it and get things on the calendar that we love now.
Laurie Graham 27:00
After that, you’re going to close off the meeting with highlights. Ask every person who came just to share one thing they enjoyed about the planning party, one thing they got out of it, or one thing that encouraged them. And then close in prayer, and you’re done. This literally can happen in 75 minutes. If you do a planning party, it very well could be the most exciting, fun thing that you’ve ever done for your ministry area. Again, it builds a lot of momentum. It actually gets people excited about your ministry area. It does help to develop volunteers, whether they step up immediately, or they’ve just enjoyed being part of the planning. So, so good. You want to share this planning party and promote it to a wide variety of people and just watch who comes. So that’s a little bit about the planning party.
Laurie Graham 27:50
I mentioned that I’m going to tell you some of the top mistakes, or things that I want to just highlight as these things are important. Please don’t take them out.
Laurie Graham 28:01
Occasionally we have people say, “Okay, it was my first planning party ever, so I just wanted to do it with our team, the core team, so that I could see how it worked.” You all, that’s not a planning party. It’s not a planning party. One of the main goals of the planning party is to involve other people. This is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of ministries start losing momentum. You have a core team of people who are willing to sacrifice, do all the planning, do this for people. And then we wonder why other people aren’t coming to the events. They’re not showing up. They’re not consistent. Because people want to be part of that vision. Please, invite everyone. Make the circle very, very wide.
Laurie Graham 28:43
The second thing is the Post-its. I’ve had occasionally a person will say, “Yeah, my planning party didn’t go so well,” and I asked them how the Post-its went and they said, “Oh, we decided not to do the Post-its. People looked at me like that was dumb, so I didn’t use them.” You guys, the Post-its are key! I don’t care what you think about Post-its, do not eliminate the Post-its. Do not eliminate the silent time when the thinkers get to write down their ideas and not get overshadowed by the talkers. Please. The quieter people in your community have so much to share. They are either thinking or too polite to interrupt the talkers. Or their ideas have been shut down so much throughout their lives that they don’t think they have something worth sharing. Please give everybody time to share. This is so important also when you are doing this with youth or children. It is such a great life skill to bring up, to elevate, to develop in people that we all have things to share. God has put vision in all of us and ideas and creativity. The Post-it notes, taking individual time, coming back and sharing. So, so good.
Laurie Graham 30:03
The other thing I want to emphasize, you have to be very, very careful not to allow judgment, sarcasm, or negativity. It has no place in this meeting at all. There will never be a time in this meeting, if done right, where you say, “Bad idea,” “Bad,” or “We tried it before.” I’ve been in some church communities where they actually say ahead of time, you can even post something on the wall that says, “These phrases are not allowed today.” We will not be saying, “No good,” “Tried it before,” “Won’t work,” like just ban those phrases from this meeting just for this meeting. There are no bad ideas; we’re not going to talk about it. These Post-its, every single idea will be kept. They might not make the calendar today, they might not make the calendar this year. But they will be kept because the ideas themselves have value.
Laurie Graham 30:57
Another thing to mention is please consider having an emcee, a party leader, that might not be the main leader of your group. I have had pastors who will bring an emcee in because when the pastor leads the all-church meeting, I just want you to think about that dynamic. People often try to please the leader, or they already have enough history with the leader that they know they don’t like a certain idea, which kind of closes it off a little bit. If you could have an emcee, it could be you if you’re the ministry leader. But I’m just saying, consider having someone else if there are some dynamics that might quiet the ideas that you don’t want. And the other thing I want to say: Please plan the 12 events for the year before you leave.
Laurie Graham 31:50
This comment gets brought up a little bit: “We did a great planning party. It was so fun, it was super encouraging, so many great ideas. We’re going to take a week or so to put them on the calendar.”
Laurie Graham 32:01
Can I just say that is one of the biggest mistakes I see? Because what happens then is you lose momentum. Again, planning is being done behind closed doors. You also just lost all the people at your planning party who have their calendars and know what works for them. They’re here! They’ve got their calendars! You’re going to plan this, you know, this intergenerational hike. They’re all right there! Pick the date with them. “Hey, you all, look at your calendars. Does this Saturday work? Oh, that doesn’t work. We’ve got like, this big community garage sale.” Which date works better? This is why you plan it before you leave.
Laurie Graham 32:39
The other reason is this: as soon as you walk out the door, you lose momentum. Have you ever heard that about a car, like you buy a car, and as soon as it’s driven off the lot, it loses like a whole bunch of its value just by driving it off the lot? The same thing happens when you leave a meeting. If you don’t have clear action plans before you leave, momentum gets lost. Because what people say, whether they’re saying it or not, what people think is, “Oh, I wonder if that will really happen.”
Laurie Graham 33:08
So if you can show them at the end of the meeting, “These are the dates, put them on your calendar.” And by the way, there are things to do ahead of time to make sure you’re picking dates. You’re going to want to look ahead of time at community dates, Super Bowl parties, other church things. This is part of one of the steps that we actually planned for everything, is knowing that ahead of time. So as you’re picking dates, you are picking good dates.
Laurie Graham 33:30
All right. What do you think? Can you do it? Do you want to try it? Now, sometimes people are terrified to do something new because they’re scared they’re going to fail. You know what? I’m going to say this: I have never seen a planning party fail. I have seen it not have the exact results that you might have wanted. I had one myself not too long ago that really didn’t turn out quite how I had planned. I learned so much, though. Take a step. Try this. Because God is at work everywhere you are, he will be at work. There’s nothing that we do the first time that’s perfect. This is why we practice.
Laurie Graham 34:12
Do a planning party. Follow the principles we outlined here. Check out the blog post that gives you some more details. If you want to purchase one of the ministry bundles, there’s some more details in there as well. Whatever works for you, but just give it a shot. Give it a shot. And let us know how it goes.
Laurie Graham 34:31
If you want to read some other success stories, just go to “Creative Solutions for Small Churches,” our free Facebook community. By the way, we hit 10,000 people in there last week—so excited! There are so many people from small churches, all around the globe, getting connected, sharing ideas, things that work. But if you do go into that Facebook community, you can search “planning parties,” and you will see testimony after testimony after testimony after testimony of people who have used this system and found more success, more volunteers, more momentum, more excitement. It’s one of those gifts. It’s a gift from us to you. It’s a gift from Jesus to us, just that we have this creativity to tap into, that we have the body of Christ, which is broader than we think, with ideas to share and things to give. And if we can tap into that, we’re going to have a really fun year.
Laurie Graham 35:28
All right, check out those planning parties. Thank you so much for listening in today. I really appreciate just spending time with you. It is such a privilege to be around people who are just wanting to be used by Jesus, wherever they’re at in their small churches, all over the globe, connecting together and saying, “Hey, God, use me, use me.” And I feel so privileged and honored to have you as part of that. So until next week, be a light.
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry podcast.
Laurie Graham 0:14
Hey, welcome back to the Small Church Ministry Podcast. If you haven’t been waiting for it, this is the episode you didn’t know you needed, but you’re going to love it! We’re going to talk about everything planning party, at least everything I can cover in about half an hour.
Laurie Graham 0:31
Now, we have story upon story upon story that comes out in our Facebook community when we have our live events, people talking all about the planning parties. And my daughter reminded me recently that I have never done an actual dedicated episode to planning parties. So this is what you’re going to get here. I’m going to tell you why you need a planning party, how it can help your church ministry. I’m going to share some testimonies of what people have found with the planning parties. I’m going to give you the clear steps to make planning parties work, and also several resources that can help you pull this together.
Laurie Graham 1:03
If you are a regular listener of the podcast, you’ve probably heard me mention planning parties. I’ve talked about it when we talk about starting new ministries from scratch or restarting them. I’ve mentioned it when we talk about not doing ministry to people but with them. We’ve talked about planning parties for recruiting new volunteers and building your teams. But today, I’m going to outline exactly what you need, how a planning party works, and what’s going to make it super successful.
Laurie Graham 1:30
To start off with a few testimonies, I literally just went into our huge Facebook community and I did a little search for planning parties. These are not in any particular order. Literally, these just popped up. And if I scroll, there will be tons more, but here are some stories that have come out of our Facebook community.
Laurie Graham 1:47
Lisa Hodges wrote, “We had our church-wide planning party today. For us, the biggest boost was getting a point person for each event. For the past two years, the planning has fallen to my husband and I. We have a lot of good encouragement and energy, and from the ideas, we can see what direction the ministry should focus on and take this year.”
Laurie Graham 2:09
Kenya Williams said this, “We held our women’s ministry planning party last week using the four-week plan. We did an open invitation to all women in church 18 years and older. We advertised it as a night to come fellowship and share ideas for the women’s ministry. We had 24 ladies of various ages attend. Many were women who are not currently plugged in and connected to any team or small group and only attend Sunday worship. We started as a committee of three, but at the meeting, we extended the invitation for women to join us in planning upcoming events for the year. And we had three more volunteer to help.” Is that not awesome?
Laurie Graham 2:46
When people talk about bringing in women who are not usually plugged in, or people who only come on Sundays and involving them, it just gets my heart going. Okay, here are a couple more.
Laurie Graham 2:56
Maribel Miller posted several pictures and she said, “Here are a few pics of our women’s ministry planning party last Friday. It was a total success. Thank you, Jesus.” Just love that.
Laurie Graham 3:06
Khaleesi Wilcox posted this. She said, “I have to give a huge shout-out for planning parties. We had our second harvest party planning party this year, which is at the beginning of October, and I was so surprised that people were so on board simply because they remembered or they missed out on last year’s planning party. I strongly suggest having planning parties when you’ve been doing everything yourself.” See, this is like a way to get more people involved.
Laurie Graham 3:32
Planning parties can be used for youth ministry, women’s ministry, all-church ministry, so many ways to do it.
Laurie Graham 3:38
Just a couple more little testimonies. Brittany Fox said, “I purchased the youth ministry bundle when it was on sale during anniversary week. We just had our planning party last night. I think it went really well. So many awesome ideas. God is doing big things in our little church.”
Laurie Graham 3:53
And just one more: Jessie Manzi has held a planning party for the past four years. I remember when she posted she had her first one. And she said, “Here it is, my annual thank you for the pizza and planning party post. This was year four for us. The first year in 2020, I had three kids. This year, our annual planning party and New Year’s Eve lock-in started with 15 kids.” She said, “This year I added ‘what are we going to study’ portion to the event in the evening. So now I’ve practically our entire year completely planned. Thank you ever so much.”
Laurie Graham 4:29
So these are just shout-outs of people in our community who have used this concept of having a planning party. Again, there are so many more stories to share, especially with people who’ve done all-church planning parties where they have the different teams combined, like women and men and outreach and prayer and worship and leadership, all doing a planning party together.
Laurie Graham 4:49
This concept of a planning party, as I mentioned, we’re going to break it down. You can use it in kids ministry, youth ministry, women’s ministry, outreach, as I mentioned, all-church, any ministry areas that do event planning, or even programming like teaching, like small groups.
Laurie Graham 5:07
We have tons of resources that support the planning party concept; we will drop them in the show notes. There are several episodes in the podcast that kind of touched on it. But really, there are a couple of free blog posts you may want to check out. One is called “Five Steps to a Youth Ministry Kickoff Event.” These have concepts in it again, that can be used far beyond youth ministry. There’s another post on the website called “Your Best Ever Women’s Ministry Planning Party.” A lot of people resource that too. And you probably heard from the testimonies that our ministry bundles also have them included; we’ll make sure to drop that in the show notes.
Laurie Graham 5:42
So before I get into the six steps to planning a successful planning party, I just want to go over why you would want this: if you are tired of doing everything yourself, you want to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 5:56
If it’s the same people doing the same things all the time, you want to do a planning party. If you’re trying to connect different people—maybe some who are involved and some who aren’t, or you’ve got that generational break where the older women are involved but not the younger ones, or the other way around—you want to do a planning party. If you’re tired of doing ministry for people and having them not show up, or they say they want these events and then they don’t come, you want to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 6:29
Planning parties help paint the vision of what you’re about. But they’re including people in a way that others are part of the vision. You will get more volunteers, you’ll grow more supporters, people will be more excited, there’s more momentum. Another great reason to do a planning party is when you’re doing an all-church planning party, if you feel like different ministries are competing for dates, or you could do so much more if you were on the same page. Another great reason to do a planning party.
Laurie Graham 6:55
The last reason is, they are just crazy fun. They can just be a really great time, build a lot of community as well. But they’re also super effective; you can get an entire year of your events planned out in one night. And the goal is to leave with a point person who is either in charge of or partnering with each of the different events. So there are so many great blessings that come out of this, and even those side benefits that you didn’t even plan for. So let me get into the six steps for a successful planning party.
Laurie Graham 7:26
The first one is this: you’ve got to choose the best time and date for the planning party, which means you should not pick this date by yourself. You want to look at the people that you want to involve, which is going to be a very, very wide net; we’ll talk a little bit about that. Not just your core volunteers, or the people that you think will care. You want to look at some really great dates. Look at some key people that you would love to make sure they can come.
Check with them before you set the date. I don’t know if this has happened to you; I’m going to guess it probably has. It’s happened to me numerous times over 30 years of ministry: I plan a date, and I totally missed that somebody from the church was graduating that day, or had a party that day, or there was a sports event or a community event. And all of a sudden, you’ve got this amazing thing planned, but the date and time are terrible. We do not want that to happen for your planning party.
Laurie Graham 8:22
The next thing: you do want to evaluate last year before your next planning party. Now, this can be done with a small group of people. I never liked doing anything in ministry alone, so I would definitely loop in some people. If you don’t have a team, other ministry leaders. If you don’t have other ministry leaders, some people who have been involved on and off. But you really want to look at what happened, like the vision, the goals that you are really looking toward.
You kind of want to evaluate based on if those purposes are met, not just, “Oh, we had six people at this small group,” or, “We had this many people at these events.” Are they actually fulfilling the purpose of the events that you had? Are your studies drawing people deeper? How are things going? Another reason why you want to kind of look at last year before your planning party is you really want to look ahead to where you want to go. And we’re not going to be looking ahead until we look at where we are. So, bring God into that vision, like, “Where could we go?” and have that in mind before you have this planning party.
Laurie Graham 9:20
The next thing: you do want to evaluate last year before your next planning party. Now, this can be done with a small group of people. I never liked doing anything in ministry alone, so I would definitely loop in some people. If you don’t have a team, other ministry leaders. If you don’t have other ministry leaders, some people who have been involved on and off. But you really want to look at what happened, like the vision, the goals that you are really looking toward.
You kind of want to evaluate based on if those purposes are met, not just, “Oh, we had six people at this small group,” or, “We had this many people at these events.” Are they actually fulfilling the purpose of the events that you had? Are your studies drawing people deeper? How are things going? Another reason why you want to kind of look at last year before your planning party is you really want to look ahead to where you want to go. And we’re not going to be looking ahead until we look at where we are. So, bring God into that vision, like, “Where could we go?” and have that in mind before you have this planning party.
Laurie Graham 10:27
The next thing is, you want to promote your planning party in a really different way than you’ve ever promoted anything before. Because if you think about it, like how many church announcements are happening every Sunday, on your slides, in your newsletter, in your emails? This has to stand out in such a different way because you want a lot of people to come, not just your core. And one of the testimonies I read earlier out of the Facebook group said they had people who were totally on the outside, the people who were just kind of coming to church, had never been involved, came to the planning party.
Now, how did that happen? I’m going to tell you, it is because it was promoted in a way that made these people who never come to anything think, “Oh, this will be different.” It has to be different. It can’t look like your normal events. It can’t look like one more women’s ministry planning thing. It can’t look like one more outreach planning meeting. It’s got to look different. So you want to promote this planning party really, really wide. You want to invite everyone who even can kind of touch into this ministry area, because this is how you start doing ministry with people instead of for them. It’s very fun, it’s very active, and people will be heard.
Laurie Graham 11:50
Okay, the next thing about the planning party is you want to set up your room well. You’ve got to think “party”—you don’t want it to look exactly the same as when everybody else comes in. The fun thing is, if you follow all of our notes and the way that we talk about setting up planning parties, you’re going to have some cool stuff on the walls. You’re going to have some calendar pages up, you’re going to have brightly colored Post-it notes, brightly colored pens, you’re going to have a lot of fun stuff going on in the room. So if you do follow all our outlines, it’s really great. You want people to be sitting at small group tables, like tables for four to six people. If you have a micro church, which you’re not alone—tons of people who follow us have churches of under 50—you may only need one table or two tables. That’s totally fine.
But you don’t want more than four to six people at each table group. You want table groups set up, and you want a happy facilitator at each one of those groups. So again, one table is fine, but if you’ve got more than four to six people, you’re going to want more tables set up. Food and drinks are so important; make it welcoming. Please don’t serve a crazy meal, though; you don’t want to take away the time. The planning party agenda is pretty tight, and if you spend half an hour eating, you will lose the time that you need. People don’t want to come to things that are longer than 90 minutes max. We actually set up planning parties to be like 75 minutes, an hour and 15 minutes, 90 minutes max. So don’t plan on doing a whole meal because it will cut into your time and you’re not going to like that at all. So you definitely want to follow and set up your room really well.
Laurie Graham 13:36
And then you want to be really intentional. This is step number six. We have straight-up agendas that are planned. You can find it in the free post. You can find variations of it in a lot of our different resources. But you want to be really intentional with these timed segments. They are on purpose. If you’ve ever been to a ministry meeting, you’ve probably seen tangents start, or rabbit trails, maybe even some complaining, or perhaps some conversations that should happen later, maybe some criticism, or just some way-off ideas that take all the attention away. We have the agenda set up really intentionally to follow through. Now, it can feel a little annoying, with a timer and a bell. If that bothers you, we really want you just to love it, fall in love with it, embrace it, because there are reasons for every little detail we have in there. You want to keep on track and you want to be intentional.
Laurie Graham 14:34
So now that I gave you the general six steps: choose a great time and date, choose a party leader or an emcee, the third one was evaluate last year before the next planning party, make sure you have a great promotional plan to extend very, very wide, number five was setting up the party room well, and number six is being really intentional with all these segments. Now I’m going to briefly run through how a planning party is run, a little bit of why it happens the way it does, and why we’ve planned it this way. And then we’ll talk about a few big mistakes that I would love for you to avoid, and then we’ll kind of wrap up. So the planning party agenda is planned on purpose in order. If you’ve never done it before, we just really suggest you follow it straight through. If you’re used to this type of meeting, and you want to kind of morph it or tailor it to your group, feel free to do that. But if you’ve never done one of these, please embrace what we have first. You know, that’s one of those things with learning, right? You learn a system from somebody, and once you put it together, you can kind of tailor it. But don’t throw out the system until you’ve tried it, because I promise you it works.
Laurie Graham 15:46
So you’re going to start out with some welcome and introductions. If you already know everybody, I totally get that; most of us do, we’re in small churches. But I want to tell you that sometimes we miss this welcome time. It’s really important. It’s almost like a little bit of a downshift from your day. Everybody’s walking into a meeting or a planning party with whatever has happened to them in that day, whether it’s early or late. And when you can do like welcome and introductions with a little bit of a mixer game—we love the candy mixer game as the one we suggest for the planning party—it just kind of breaks down that, I don’t know, just the baggage we’re walking in with. It’s almost like a, it’s just a shift into a new mode. So we really recommend that you do a real quick mixer type game, even if everybody knows each other.
Laurie Graham 16:37
The second part is just sharing a little bit of your vision and goals. Because your goal for the day is to walk out of here with an entire year of core events on the calendar. This might shock people, if you think about how we usually plan and how it’s belabored and how it gets very stressful, or people are doing it behind closed doors, right? That’s how usually it happens. There’s a ministry team, a core team that plans things, and then everybody else hears about it later. What you’re saying is, “Together as a group, we are going to plan the year.” It is so different, it is so motivating. You do want to share a little bit of your vision and mission to get people excited. If you embrace the ministry funnel, you might want to share that. If there’s some new value that you’re trying to enter in, or if you have a new vision for the community, you may want to share that before you get going. But that’s really short; it’s like five to 10 minutes total.
Laurie Graham 17:33
Then you’re going to enter a time of individual brainstorming. Now you’ve got to stay with me on this: it’s got to be individual. I want you to think of a typical church meeting where the people who talk a lot or have the strongest opinions are heard. And other people either add their opinions or other people shut down, or people are getting interrupted, or people are just kind of, they’re just not even going to share. One of the beauties of the planning parties is we want to hear from everyone. If you want to hear from everyone, that doesn’t happen out loud with voices; it often happens in different ways. So the individual brainstorming session is five to seven minutes. And this is where everybody gets a pen and a Post-it note. When the timer starts, you give people a few minutes just to write down as many ideas as they have for whatever you are planning, on a Post-it note, individually, with no talking.
Again, there are very clear instructions in the blog post that I mentioned; you’re going to want to look it up if you’ve never done anything like that. But the goal is to come up with as many ideas as we can. Now, if you’ve been in a place where you say, “I’ve asked people for their ideas, and they don’t give me any,” I want to tell you the main reason why is because all of us have grown up in a society, a system, a family, a school, any kind of setting where we share an idea, and somebody tells us, “That’s a wrong idea,” or “It’s a stupid idea,” or “That idea won’t work.” Do you know how many ideas people have shared over the course of history that get answered with the response, “That won’t work?” It’s very common. That’s why we’re not doing that here. We’re just writing tons of ideas on Post-it notes. And we’re not going to tell anybody that it’s not going to work. So if you take this five to seven minutes to write ideas on Post-it notes, you are going to have a huge amount of ideas, all sitting on Post-it notes individually. Your goal is to keep the energy positive. All kinds of stuff we’re getting, you’re going, you’re letting people know, “Just anything goes! Anything goes!” Write one idea on each note.
Laurie Graham 19:46
After the individual brainstorming time is up, then you get to talk together as a table group. If you have several different tables, you’re just talking as table groups; you’re not talking as the large group. If you do have a large group, you’ll bring it back and share different ideas from the large group. Now, during this time, you have not slimmed down a number of ideas into small ideas. You are not judging anything. This entire time we are celebrating every idea that comes up, whether or not you’ve tried it before, whether or not you think it’s good. We literally are celebrating the number of ideas that have happened. Now what you will see if you do this well, if you’ve got an emcee and a party leader, and people are on board, you will start seeing the mood in the room change from “I don’t know if my ideas are good. I’m scared to share.
The leaders always plan everything,” to “I’ve got something to share! How fun is this? Let’s keep going!” After all these ideas are out, I’m going to tell you, you could have 100 ideas on Post-it notes, you could have more than that, you could have 30. But you will have more ideas if you follow this system than you’ve ever had before. So after that, you’re going to take a few minutes to organize them into categories. Now, you should probably have a few different categories in mind before you get started. These might vary in your church, though. So you may have subgroups like sports events, outdoor events, community events, events with food. Sometimes when I’ve done planning parties, I haven’t really done categories until I watch what people are writing, especially if you’re doing this with a youth group. Because oftentimes, as they’re writing, you’ll see, “Oh, that kind of gets grouped together; this group wants to travel,” right? But however it comes out, you do want to organize them in categories, because you’ll start seeing doubles, you’ll start seeing duplicates, you’ll start seeing where there’s a lot of energy. And organizing them in categories will help kind of boil it down to where you want to be picking.
Laurie Graham 21:52
We’re almost done. Are you already having fun just listening to me, because this can be a hoot!
Laurie Graham 21:58
The next thing you’re going to do is choose top events. I love to call this sticker time. So I always get a whole bunch of stickers and I give everybody a certain number of stickers, and they get to vote on the top ideas that they want. Sometimes you’ll have them vote for 20 ideas, maybe you’ll have them vote for five; it depends on your numbers and the goals of your event. But we’re not going to pick everything that gets voted for, and we’re not even going to necessarily pick the one that has the most votes. But what this does is it lets you see where there is energy, where people are excited, even in the categories—what people are excited about. When I’ve done this for youth groups or children’s ministry, I’ve actually given them special stickers, and I’ve made them vote in a certain category, like they can vote on all the events, but they need to put five stickers in the area of service projects or service events.
Because sometimes, as I mentioned, you may be coming in with a goal of, you know, we really want to develop more outreach in our community, it’s part of our family ministries, or intergenerational. And so you may have all these ideas, and only some of them are reaching out in the community. And so it’s okay to say, “Hey, we really want to make sure you hit a few in this category. So don’t miss this category.” As I mentioned, these Post-it notes, when you read some of the articles that I’ve mentioned, it gives you a little more detail. But when you do the categories, I love to put them usually on a wall. And so I’ll take some painter’s tape and put sections on a wall, or maybe you’ve got a bulletin board or a whiteboard or something that you’re using. But then the Post-it notes go up on the wall in the different categories. This also gets people up and moving. Another great thing when you’re having a party, you don’t want to just sit at a table, right? You want to be able to have some movement. It helps people think and it also just breaks up some of the complacency of sitting in one space.
Laurie Graham 23:56
So then after that, you’re going to kind of wrap up. Sometimes it’s really great to put a little break in here. If you’ve got a team that’s a leadership team or some people who are rising up to kind of help a little bit, you might need a little breather in there to kind of look at everything and assess, you know, where do we want to go with this? Typically, what I like to share is that you choose one event, if you’re doing women’s ministry, outreach ministry, children’s ministry, men’s ministry, anything that’s kind of like an event-type of ministry. Choose just one monthly event and put it on the calendar, during your planning party, before you leave.
Laurie Graham 24:35
These can be the simple things. They don’t have to be the “Oh my gosh, let’s do a mission trip to Haiti.” You might not want to put that on your calendar this year. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to do it, right? All these ideas are great. It is really important to say to people, “These ideas are great. We might not do them all this year. But what we do want to do is choose 12 events, something that we came up with today, right here and now with you all. We’ll do one a month for the next year. Put them on the calendar.”
Laurie Graham 25:07
Now you can work together and help to kind of move and shape this in a way that it is feasible for you. But there will be 12 events that are easy events that will be successful, that don’t take a lot of prep. Now, if you’ve got a team there, and they’re ready to go, and they are all about doing this auction fundraiser for the youth to go on their mission trip, that’s great. But if not, you’re going to want to choose events that fit how much planning and prep that you have to give within your capacity. You can think about costs.
Laurie Graham 25:44
A lot of times when this starts happening, when you start choosing with the entire group, people will rise up and say, “I would love to be part of that! If you did that, I will totally help to organize that.” And that’s what I’ve always done at the planning parties is play around the Post-it IDs until you have logical dates, until you have one volunteer at least who’s going to be a contact or organizer or even head up one event per month. You want to leave this planning party with a calendar that already has dates chosen.
Laurie Graham 26:18
Now, there’s a lot of reasons for that, I’m going to get into that a little bit when I talk about some of the biggest mistakes that people can make. And I shouldn’t even say mistakes, I should just say, if you did this differently, it would come out better. And having somebody or a team of people who are actually kind of stepping up to say, “Hey, I’d love to help with that one. I’d love to help with that one,” it’s actually really important. If no one is excited about an idea that you’re putting on a calendar, no one’s stepping up saying, “Oh, I’d like to even be part of that,” I really would table that event for the future. It might be a great event, but let’s table it and get things on the calendar that we love now.
Laurie Graham 27:00
After that, you’re going to close off the meeting with highlights. Ask every person who came just to share one thing they enjoyed about the planning party, one thing they got out of it, or one thing that encouraged them. And then close in prayer, and you’re done. This literally can happen in 75 minutes. If you do a planning party, it very well could be the most exciting, fun thing that you’ve ever done for your ministry area. Again, it builds a lot of momentum. It actually gets people excited about your ministry area. It does help to develop volunteers, whether they step up immediately, or they’ve just enjoyed being part of the planning. So, so good. You want to share this planning party and promote it to a wide variety of people and just watch who comes. So that’s a little bit about the planning party.
Laurie Graham 27:50
I mentioned that I’m going to tell you some of the top mistakes, or things that I want to just highlight as these things are important. Please don’t take them out.
Laurie Graham 28:01
Occasionally we have people say, “Okay, it was my first planning party ever, so I just wanted to do it with our team, the core team, so that I could see how it worked.” You all, that’s not a planning party. It’s not a planning party. One of the main goals of the planning party is to involve other people. This is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of ministries start losing momentum. You have a core team of people who are willing to sacrifice, do all the planning, do this for people. And then we wonder why other people aren’t coming to the events. They’re not showing up. They’re not consistent. Because people want to be part of that vision. Please, invite everyone. Make the circle very, very wide.
Laurie Graham 28:43
The second thing is the Post-its. I’ve had occasionally a person will say, “Yeah, my planning party didn’t go so well,” and I asked them how the Post-its went and they said, “Oh, we decided not to do the Post-its. People looked at me like that was dumb, so I didn’t use them.” You guys, the Post-its are key! I don’t care what you think about Post-its, do not eliminate the Post-its. Do not eliminate the silent time when the thinkers get to write down their ideas and not get overshadowed by the talkers. Please. The quieter people in your community have so much to share. They are either thinking or too polite to interrupt the talkers. Or their ideas have been shut down so much throughout their lives that they don’t think they have something worth sharing. Please give everybody time to share. This is so important also when you are doing this with youth or children. It is such a great life skill to bring up, to elevate, to develop in people that we all have things to share. God has put vision in all of us and ideas and creativity. The Post-it notes, taking individual time, coming back and sharing. So, so good.
Laurie Graham 30:03
The other thing I want to emphasize, you have to be very, very careful not to allow judgment, sarcasm, or negativity. It has no place in this meeting at all. There will never be a time in this meeting, if done right, where you say, “Bad idea,” “Bad,” or “We tried it before.” I’ve been in some church communities where they actually say ahead of time, you can even post something on the wall that says, “These phrases are not allowed today.” We will not be saying, “No good,” “Tried it before,” “Won’t work,” like just ban those phrases from this meeting just for this meeting. There are no bad ideas; we’re not going to talk about it. These Post-its, every single idea will be kept. They might not make the calendar today, they might not make the calendar this year. But they will be kept because the ideas themselves have value.
Laurie Graham 30:57
Another thing to mention is please consider having an emcee, a party leader, that might not be the main leader of your group. I have had pastors who will bring an emcee in because when the pastor leads the all-church meeting, I just want you to think about that dynamic. People often try to please the leader, or they already have enough history with the leader that they know they don’t like a certain idea, which kind of closes it off a little bit. If you could have an emcee, it could be you if you’re the ministry leader. But I’m just saying, consider having someone else if there are some dynamics that might quiet the ideas that you don’t want. And the other thing I want to say: Please plan the 12 events for the year before you leave.
Laurie Graham 31:50
This comment gets brought up a little bit: “We did a great planning party. It was so fun, it was super encouraging, so many great ideas. We’re going to take a week or so to put them on the calendar.”
Laurie Graham 32:01
Can I just say that is one of the biggest mistakes I see? Because what happens then is you lose momentum. Again, planning is being done behind closed doors. You also just lost all the people at your planning party who have their calendars and know what works for them. They’re here! They’ve got their calendars! You’re going to plan this, you know, this intergenerational hike. They’re all right there! Pick the date with them. “Hey, you all, look at your calendars. Does this Saturday work? Oh, that doesn’t work. We’ve got like, this big community garage sale.” Which date works better? This is why you plan it before you leave.
Laurie Graham 32:39
The other reason is this: as soon as you walk out the door, you lose momentum. Have you ever heard that about a car, like you buy a car, and as soon as it’s driven off the lot, it loses like a whole bunch of its value just by driving it off the lot? The same thing happens when you leave a meeting. If you don’t have clear action plans before you leave, momentum gets lost. Because what people say, whether they’re saying it or not, what people think is, “Oh, I wonder if that will really happen.”
Laurie Graham 33:08
So if you can show them at the end of the meeting, “These are the dates, put them on your calendar.” And by the way, there are things to do ahead of time to make sure you’re picking dates. You’re going to want to look ahead of time at community dates, Super Bowl parties, other church things. This is part of one of the steps that we actually planned for everything, is knowing that ahead of time. So as you’re picking dates, you are picking good dates.
Laurie Graham 33:30
All right. What do you think? Can you do it? Do you want to try it? Now, sometimes people are terrified to do something new because they’re scared they’re going to fail. You know what? I’m going to say this: I have never seen a planning party fail. I have seen it not have the exact results that you might have wanted. I had one myself not too long ago that really didn’t turn out quite how I had planned. I learned so much, though. Take a step. Try this. Because God is at work everywhere you are, he will be at work. There’s nothing that we do the first time that’s perfect. This is why we practice.
Laurie Graham 34:12
Do a planning party. Follow the principles we outlined here. Check out the blog post that gives you some more details. If you want to purchase one of the ministry bundles, there’s some more details in there as well. Whatever works for you, but just give it a shot. Give it a shot. And let us know how it goes.
Laurie Graham 34:31
If you want to read some other success stories, just go to “Creative Solutions for Small Churches,” our free Facebook community. By the way, we hit 10,000 people in there last week—so excited! There are so many people from small churches, all around the globe, getting connected, sharing ideas, things that work. But if you do go into that Facebook community, you can search “planning parties,” and you will see testimony after testimony after testimony after testimony of people who have used this system and found more success, more volunteers, more momentum, more excitement. It’s one of those gifts. It’s a gift from us to you. It’s a gift from Jesus to us, just that we have this creativity to tap into, that we have the body of Christ, which is broader than we think, with ideas to share and things to give. And if we can tap into that, we’re going to have a really fun year.
Laurie Graham 35:28
All right, check out those planning parties. Thank you so much for listening in today. I really appreciate just spending time with you. It is such a privilege to be around people who are just wanting to be used by Jesus, wherever they’re at in their small churches, all over the globe, connecting together and saying, “Hey, God, use me, use me.” And I feel so privileged and honored to have you as part of that. So until next week, be a light.