Guest Blog: Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

Last Sunday at Elevation Church we decided to stop telling the married couples of the church to go on a date and actually send them. Pastor has been challenging men over the last few weeks to “date their wives”.

With the economy hanging on by a thread (at least if you watch the news), we wanted to be proactive and actually remove all excuses. So we gave every married couple the opportunity to get a $30 restaurant gift card and get reimbursed for 3 hrs of childcare.

Several months ago, we made the call to set aside the resources to do this for our church and just because people are waiting in line for gas we weren’t going to back down. I have to admit, when Pastor came to me with the idea I immediately got the calculator out but this speaks volumes to his heart to see married couples date and communicate.

The response was overwhelming. Looking at our demographics, approximately 75% of the married couples in the church participated. Below is an example of a print piece we used and some basic details on what we did. We weren’t the first church to do this and our hope in posting this is that we won’t be the last.

Details:
Pastor announced it during his sermon. Everyone was given a card with the same information on the voucher above and picked one of the 12 pre-selected restaurants (we worked with the restaurant managers to make this simple). People then went to one of the many volunteers in the lobby at multiple stations and exchanged their completed card (contact info and restaurant choice) for a date night envelope containing the voucher and a childcare reimbursement form. The volunteers just made sure to mark the voucher for the restaurant they selected. We then created a master spreadsheet for everyone that signed up and created guest books that we took to the hostesses at all the restaurants and purchased the enough $30 gift cards for all the guests. Couples will now simply go to the restaurant they chose and give the hostess their voucher for their gift card and then send their childcare reimbursement form to the church offices. We set a 2 week window to go on the date to prompt action, limited it to married couples, and told everyone to tip well!

Here are a few more resources.