Grand Opening Ideas for your church

This past weekend, we had the Grand Opening of our new church building which has been under construction for over a year.  We built a new kids area, renovated our office space, and built a 2nd auditorium that seats 300 people.  Here are a few Grand Openings Ideas that we did.

Having a Grand Opening creates an opportunity to invite people to come and see your facility & experience a little bit of what your church is like.  Here is what we did for our Grand Opening.

Saturday Open House:  (drop in format & people could stay as long or a little as they liked)

Kids Entertainment.  We had 7 activities or shows happening at various times throughout the kids area which included:

• Birds Of Prey Show – a Raptor Conservatory that brought live birds for everyone to see

• Kids Music Entertainer – did 2 interactive shows for families
• Disney Princesses – 6 teens/adults dressed in costume and looked a lot like the Disney Princesses that you would see at a Disney Theme Park.  Families could meet & greet & take photos with the princesses.

• Indoor Playground – our newly installed playground was open for families
• Craft Room – tables, chairs, supplies & craft examples for families to make together
• Balloon Animals – volunteers made balloon animals/shapes for kids
• Interactive Electronic Puppet – a software program we purchased from Little Mountain Productions.

Food – Several areas throughout the church had food stations for people to pick up a snack.

Decorations – We ordered punch balloons that had our logo on it.  We started a few days before grand opening to blow up all the balloons.  We used a tree stump as a base, and then attached a pole to the base.  We put the punch balloon elastics over the poles to create balloon pillars.

Give Aways – Kids could take a punch balloon home with them on their way out.

Other Entertainment – The youth band, and a drum circle did several shows in other parts of the building.

Ministry Displays – Many of our ministries made a display for people to see.  This helped give people an idea of some of the programs that are offered at our church.

Sunday Dedication Service – We had a service to dedicate the building.  We invited the trades who worked on the project as well as dignitaries from our area.  We also included a ribbon cutting in the service.

I hope these Grand Opening Ideas jump start your creativity if you are looking to do a Grand Opening at your church soon.