Most church members have no idea how much time goes into a single sermon series at their church.

It starts weeks (sometimes months) before the series begins.

A pastor or group of ministry leaders meet to brainstorm the series theme.

• They pray for wisdom and discernment as they choose a sermon series that will encourage and build up the church.
• They carefully work through the themes and Scripture texts for each week.
• They determine the big idea for each sermon and text.
• They create graphics that capture the series theme and engage the church.

All of this happens before anyone in the church even knows about the new sermon series. But the work is still not over.

Each week, pastors dig into the Word of God and prepare the sermon for the upcoming Sunday…

• They study the sermon text.
• They work through how to apply it in their specific congregation.
• They pray that God will help them deliver the message with boldness and humility.

One poll from Thom Rainer revealed that the average pastor spends between 10 and 18 hours each week preparing for the sermon on Sunday. And that doesn’t include the many hours invested by others to prepare and present that sermon each week.

Why? Why do you invest so much time, money, and energy to prepare for a sermon series?

Because you believe that it’s the Word of God that has the power to change lives. You believe that God’s truth is sufficient and authoritative. You believe that the Scriptures are central to cultivating unity, worship, and spiritual transformation.

Now that you’ve prayed and prepared for these sermons, you want your entire church family to be shaped by God’s word. You want visitors to come and hear the good news of Jesus Christ. You are praying that God will use your labor and give you spiritual fruit for the glory of His name.

And this is why you want as many people as possible to be there for your weekly gathering. You want to transfer that truth to as many people as you can.

In this post, we’re going to look at 4 simple steps to turn your sermon series into an outreach tool. We want to help you reach as many people as possible with the life-transforming power of God’s Word.

To help you see how easy this can be, we’re going to use an example sermon series to illustrate all of these points.

Let’s say you are starting a sermon series that you’re calling “The Good Shepherd”. You have the sermons planned out. You’ve prayed and prepared. You’re ready.

Now how do you let people know about it? Here are 4 simple steps.

Create Sermon Graphics to Announce and Promote your Series

We recommend that you create these three sermon graphics:

Web Banner Graphics

One of the first and simplest steps to promote your sermon series is to update your church website.

Increasingly, people are using social media services like Facebook to learn about churches in their area, but church websites are still a common starting point for people who are looking for a church.

If you have a church website, you can very easily update the banner graphic to promote the current sermon series.

Social Media Graphics

Next, you’ll want to use the sermon series design to create social graphics that you can post on your church Facebook or Instagram accounts.

You can also encourage your church family to share these posts with their friends.

Screen Graphics

Finally, you can use screen graphics to let your church know about the new series.

Most church use screens or monitors to show upcoming events. Just add a slide about the upcoming sermon series to that rotation.

When the series begins, you can also use this design for your weekly sermon graphics.

Set Up Outdoor or Indoor Banners

Since there are always people driving by your church location or walking around in the buildings, you should also consider putting up some visual reminders of the sermon series.

There are a lot of options here. You can put up a vertical banner outside the church. You can put up a fabric stand banner in the lobby. You can even print posters and put them up around your community.

The great things about these banner and sign options is that you can put them up a week before the series starts and leave them up until it’s over.

Send an Email out to your Church List

If you have an email list of members and regular attenders, you should also send out a simple announcement email to everyone on your list.

This email doesn’t need to be long. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be. Just put your sermon graphic and a few short paragraphs telling people what you’re doing and inviting them to join your church on this mini-journey.

There are free email services like MailerLite (https://www.mailerlite.com/) that can help you send these emails and track who opens them and responds to them.

With emails like this one, it’s usually a good idea to end the email with a question, something to capture the reader’s attention and build interest.

Print Mini Invite Cards for your Church Family

Once you’ve created a sermon graphic for your series, it’s easy to turn that into a design that can be printed for your church family.

Using one of the design templates at ProChurch, you could simply upload the sermon series graphic to the front of the card. Then, on the back, you can write a short, crisp sentence describing what the series is about.

Make sure you also include the dates, times, address, and contact info.

There are two huge benefits of putting a physical invite card in the hands of your church family.

It Reminds your Church Family to be there Each Week

On the Sunday before your new sermon series starts, you, you can hand out one of these cards to everyone as they leave.

The front of the card should tell them what the series is about and the back of the card should tell them why they’re not going to want to miss it.

It Helps your Church Family Invite Others to Attend with Them

Encourage your church family to give out the invitation to a friend that week. A personal invitation from friend is still the most effective way to reach new people through your church.

The description on the back of the card is important here, because it gives your people the words to use when inviting other people.

Over to You

These are 4 simple and affordable steps to transform your sermon series into an instant outreach tool.

You can find the sermon graphics for “The Good Shepherd” here, and you can find other sermon series graphics here.

At ProChurch, we now offer free customization on any print order. So if you want to turn any of those sermon graphics into invite cards or banners, just let us know here and we’ll take care of the customization for free.