Flag Football Outreach

It’s football season and we all know how America loves its football.  So why not use football to your advantage and come up with a Flag Football outreach event. Here is how it could work:

• Pick a weekend day in either October or November at a field.  That way it is usually cool and crisp in the air and provides a great football environment.  A great day to do it is the day after Thanksgiving and call it something like the “Turkey Classic”.
• Find a location. It’d be great if you could use your church or a close by field.  If those are not available, you could try to find a community park.  A church or neighboring field would be ideal, but a community park may be better because then it is not so “threatening” to seekers who have to come to a church to play football.
• Recruit Teams. Make up a flier with a team sign up sheet.  Then pass them out to your youth to pass around to their friends.  Include girls too! Considering that it is flag football, girls are more than welcome to play.  If you are able to find a good amount of girl teams, you can create a boys division and girls division and crown a champion of both leagues.
• Recruit Parents. Parents are gonna be necessary to carry out this event.  You’ll need parents to bring their children, referee, run the “check-in” table and even serve food.  There are probably countless roles parents can take, you just have to organize a needs list and have them sign up.  I have found many times that the more parents know of your needs, the more likely they are at filling them and helping out.
• What’s your message? In order for this to be effective outreach, there has to be an opportunity for you to reach out to the students.  That can come in different forms.  Do you want to do an outreach talk or do you want to promote more of what you are doing?  If you want to use this outreach as a way to bridge students into more of what you are doing, then find a time to promote more opportunities for them to plug in.  However, don’t limit yourself to just promotion of future events.  You have students all together.  Why not share the gospel with them and see who responds?  This is a great opportunity to share Christ with, hopefully, many students who are not plugged into a church or have a relationship with him.  So use it to your advantage.
• Be Organized. Once you have the teams, the parents and the other details, organize the day so that all the details are taken care of.  Determine who will play on which field (if you have multiple field use), who are your referees, who is running the registration table, who are referees and who will be serving food.  Make sure you and at least 1 other person knows exactly what is going on so that if anyone has questions, you have answers.
• Game on! Let the fun and games begin.  Have a great time and use this as an opportunity to build relationships.
• Follow Up. Follow up is so important for an event like this.  You have just given students an awesome experience and you gave them great exposure to who Christ is.  Now follow up by befriending new people on facebook, sending out thank you notes to the players; inviting them to future events. If you connected well with a new student, invite him out for a burger or wings with some other students you know. If you could follow up with new students successfully this will really take this event from being just a good thing you did to a great event that impacted lives and your ministry in a mighty way.

So what do you think?  TAKE A MINUTE and process this.  What could you add to this idea that would make this even better?  Have you done one of these events before?  How did it go?

Post a comment so that we can all learn and benefit.