Bucket of flowers
Each year for Mother's day, our church has been doing something cool. We go out on the streets and give out flowers. Each flower has a tag that says "Happy Mother's Day from The Assembly". No invite, no "Are you going to heaven?". On the back of the card, in small print is our address.

This year we gave out 350 flowers in about 2 hours. Groups of people leave them on door handles, and in person to any people we see. One year we stood in a grocery store parking lot, handing them out to cars as they pulled out.

We find that mid-way through each year's give away, people are tracking us down to get a flower!

Of course, about 2% of the people we meet think we're selling them or have other nefarious motives, and turn us down.

The vast majority are surprised and happy. And that's the point.


We want people in our community to realize that doing Jesus stuff is fun. Christians aren't supposed to be stuffy, cold, judgmental, and cranky. We're jolting the mindset some people may have. Think of it as giving a cup of cold water in His name... only this time it's a flower.

We're careful to make sure we're doing these things in Jesus' name. There's no point to doing "acts of random kindness"- there's no lasting or eternal effects from that.

Every year, we have people who call the church (sometimes while we're still out giving flowers!) to say "thank you!". We also get cards in the mail saying how much a flower affected their day.

It's not unusual to have people show up the next Sunday with their flower in hand (or in pocket).


Logistically, it's a pretty fun & simple outreach. We call local flower shops asking them for a quantity discount. In our case, we get mixed color carnations - and we promise to return the 5 gallon buckets to the flower shop.

Recruiting help is very easy- it's a fast project (a couple hours), usually on a Saturday morning. People always return excited and energized from all the positive interactions. We typically have a post-outreach meeting, sometimes over lunch.

We're still working on getting a good Father's day outreach- but we think we've got a sure fire winner for Mother's day!