Caleb Free serves as the pastor of Abiding Word in Dothan, Alabama – a WELS home mission congregation. Free writes about the congregation’s recent grand opening festival and service.
It took months to prepare for. Immediately after we selected the dates for our grand opening celebration, we went to work. The first step in the process was securing a location to hold the grand opening festival as well as the grand opening service. Fortunately, the elementary school that we just began renting generously allowed us to use their property to hold the Festival and assured us that we would still be able to rent their gymnasium for our worship services.
Next we needed to find furnishings to “dress” up the school and make it look more like a church than a gymnasium. Fortunately, some of the ladies in our core group were able to find furnishings to do just that.
Our next challenge was to prepare for the grand opening festival. We discussed different possibilities and came up with our plan. We decided to hold a community wide festival with a specific target of families with young children. Our festival would have different bounce houses, face painting, carnival games, crafts, door prizes, a magician, and free food and drink. Different members were assigned different tasks and with a cooperative effort, we were ready for the grand opening to come.
Next we needed to get the word out about our grand opening! So six months before the grand opening we contacted WELS Kingdom Workers asking for 2 different teams of workers.
One team was a group of 3 men from Martin Luther College who decided to spend a week of their spring break helping out our congregation. We gave them two main objectives: pass out invitations and obtain door prizes from local businesses. During the week they passed out over 1500 invites and acquired 25 different door prizes.
The second team that we requested was an early mission team of a married couple. They arrived in Dothan a few days before the grand opening 
weekend and stayed with us the rest of the month of April. They also had two main objectives: follow up on the guests from the festival and service, and pass out invites for our Bible Information Class. They did a phenomenal job and we owe them a great deal of gratitude.
Finally, after months of preparation, the festival day came. It was a beautiful day, 80 and sunny with just a little breeze. We were blessed to have volunteer helpers from 3 different congregations: Amazing Grace in Panama City FL, Faith in Tallahassee FL, and Our Savior in Birmingham AL. Together, coupled with our members, we had 50 volunteers ready for the day. God blessed us with a good turnout. We had about 150 people who showed up and enjoyed the different activities. As they registered for the door prizes, they filled out a questionnaire about their church life. Many of the guests did not have a church home and almost all of the guests asked to receive more information about our church!
After all the guests and the volunteers left the festival, the core members stuck around the school to get it ready for our grand opening service. We were excited for the next day, and were praying God would bless the service as he blessed the festival. And God did! The grand opening service was awesome. We had 64 attend the service, which is basically double our previous high and triple our normal attendance. We had 10 guests from the previous days’ festival attend, as well as 20 other guests who weren’t at the festival. After months and months of preparation, we were extremely thankful and excited about the results from both the festival and the service. God has been good to his children here at Abiding Word in Dothan, Alabama.
