The Joyfest week arrives and people are scattered across the city and beyond… someone is about to do their first Act of Joy, but is anything else happening?

Build momentum during the week

The thing that will really demotivate people on the first day is feeling they might be the only one doing Acts of Joy, making it seem a pointless drop in the ocean of reaching the city.

If we can have good communication within our churches throughout the week we’ll help people realise they’re part of something bigger.

Having a method for people in your church to share what they’ve done will really enhance the week, snowballing the energy and uptake. 

When someone takes a risk and does an Act of Joy, often the first thing they want to do is tell someone how it went. So have somewhere for them to do this!

Everyone reading these posts will be motivated and inspired. This really should be an internal conversation - see the note here. You may already have a system like this in place. If not, here are some ideas how you could set this up.

Four Ideas For Communicating Within Your Church

  • This has the best functionality as everyone can post pictures and text and people can comment on other people’s posts, allowing a great sense of community.

    Everyone in the group can only see other people’s public profile. This will depend how many people use Facebook.

  • Since most people have this app, it might be the easiest thing to achieve. You can simply start a Joyfest group and share the link or QR code. 

    Doing it this way does mean that anyone joining has their phone number visible to everyone else.

  • Unlike a WhatsApp Group, in a Community you can only see contact details of people already in your address book. 

    However, only Admins can post into a Community group so for this to work you would need people to share their story directly to an Admin who can then re-post it to the Community group.

    It can tell the story of what’s happening, but is less organic and requires more central organisation.

  • You can have people email to a centrally designated Joyfest comms person.

    At the end of each day they can collate what’s happened and email to everyone signed up for the email (or an existing church email list or through ChurchSuite).

A Note on Public and Private Communication:

Joyfest is a no-strings-attached connection between the church and the city. There’s no hidden agenda or catch lurking behind each Act of Joy. We will genuinely be satisfied with simply brightening someone’s day.

However, this is a small part of a big picture: the Church’s mission to help people find God. We do hope each Act of Joy will help someone on their own spiritual journey and perhaps the Act of Joy might lead to a conversation, questions or prayer. 

We want to be able to pray for this and to celebrate when it happens.

However, if people visit our church’s public social media or website and see posts about this, there’s a real danger that they’ll feel like they were a target for a hidden agenda all along.

For this reason, it’s really helpful to have an in-house way to feedback, celebrate and pray about Joyfest.