I’m often asked by other churches or children’s ministry leaders what we do for an outreach during Easter and how we do it. Here’s my typical answer:

Easter Eggstravaganza

The Easter Eggstravaganza starts @ 11am on the Saturday before Easter. Everyone starts in the sanctuary where we put on a brief program for the kids and their parents:

• Our lead pastor sings some goofy songs on his guitar (which he is great at!!).
• Then I share a story about the “Jesus of Easter” as a certain character (in the past I’ve done Peter, Roman Centurion, thief on the cross, an angel like Arnold Schwarzenegger…)
• Then we separate the crowd into two groups for the egg hunt part: typically infants thru kindergarten as one group, then first thru grade 5-ish.

We have two separate areas for them to collect eggs–one for the younger (often inside if the weather is questionable, outside if the weather is exceptional) and one for the older (always outside… piles of snow and all sometimes!).

Every year we add more and more eggs. I think we’re up to around 6,000 eggs or so now! I have middle school students help me stuff eggs prior to the day (an annual tradition) as well as help spread them in the two areas on the morning of the event.

The egg hunt goes pretty quickly.

Then we have popcorn and juice in the gym for the participants to eat while they are counting their booty. We ask people to turn their plastic eggs back in so we can keep increasing the total from year to year (but that’s voluntary). This is a good time for me to walk around and meet people that I haven’t met before.

That’s it. Really simple. We require the parents to come with their kids. We have a start time, but no end time, because it might be done early, or it might be done late. Things tend to wind down around 11:45am.

We keep the programming time really short and engaging because the program is between them and the egg hunt, so we keep that in mind so we don’t frustrate parents or the kids unecessarily.

People love it! Especially the story part! We typically have around 500 people (kids and their families).