pat loughery

What can and should the church do on Halloween day?

Some churches provide “safe alternatives” and mimic the culture by doing a Harvest Party or something similar. Some teach against Halloween entirely.

For me personally, Halloween is bittersweet. I like seeing the little kids dressed up in costumes asking for candy at my doorstep. We live in a suburban neighborhood, and our neighborhood is a main target for trick or treating. We expect some 200 kids over the course of the evening. But I also absolutely detest seeing the kids dressed as gargoyles, witches. Last year there was a girl who was 9 or 10 dressed skanky. I asked her what she was supposed to be, and her answer was “I’m either Brittney Spears or a hooker, I haven’t decided yet.”. 9 or 10 years old.

My head spins on Halloween night, and it’s not just in response to the doorbell ringing every 27 seconds. There’s so much spiritual activity in the air it literally makes me dizzy. Whenever I have the joy of being in the spiritual presence of our enemy and his minions, I feel like the air around me is swirling.

Last year as a church we didn’t do anything special for Halloween.

This year I wanted to do something more specific, more out-going. I also wanted to do something different because we’d just set up and torn down the chairs and music and hospitality stuff for the seminar, and I didn’t want our workers to get overwhelmed.

We decided to turn the idea of people coming to our doors to get something for free on its head, and go door to door giving and serving. We decided to change batteries in smoke detectors for our neighbors. The timing is nice too; since today is the end of Daylight Savings time we’re told to change those batteries anyway.

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to tell people ahead of time that we’d be doing this instead of a regular church gathering, but Shannon strongly suggested that I’d be putting people into an awkward position if I just told them on the day-of that we were going out to serve. I decided to heed her advice, and told people last weekend what I had in mind for today.

So I went to Costco and bought 10 packages of 9v batteries, took out our servant evangelism cards, and today we went to about 20 homes to see how we could serve. We had light attendance – 3 adults and a 6 year old boy, Todd.

We started in two apartment buildings. We’d ring the doorbell first and when somebody came to the door, say something close to “we’re the Vineyard church who meets just up the street, and we’re doing a community service project. Can we change the batteries in your smoke detector for you?”. We decided that if we actually got to serve anybody, we’d also ask if they had any needs that we could pray for. (Of the 8 or 10 servant evangelism projects that we’ve done, this is the first time we have done that).

In the first apartment building, three people didn’t answer the door, and the other two had just changed their batteries. We left a card and a battery on the doorstep for those who didn’t come to the door.

In the second building of 4 apartments, the two people on the bottom floor came to the door. The guy on the left side didn’t want us to come in, but on the right side, Josephine came to the door. She’s probably in her 60s or 70s, not very tall, Native American. She invited us into her home and we went to change her battery, but found that her alarm was electrically powered. She enjoyed talking with us though, and we asked if we could pray for anything. She said she had arthritis in her arms, back and neck – so we prayed for that, simply and briefly. She talked a bit more with us, and we left. Upstairs: no luck with anybody answering the door.

Since the rest of the apartments on that street appear to be identical to that 2nd building, we decided to go to a different neighborhood filled with older homes.

Once again, more often than not people didn’t answer their doors. Two more people had just changed their batteries, so we left a card with them. We did get to meet the couple who had just bought a beautiful home there. They didn’t know if or where they had smoke detectors, so we congratulated them on their new home. Next door we met Steve, who had moved into his home a few months ago and was still trying to figure out how he wanted to decorate it. He was very gracious, enjoying the conversation. Again, electric detectors. But we got to pray for him as well. He wanted prayer, but it took him a while to think about what he wanted prayer for. Finally he settled on us asking God to bring him someone to have a relationship with. So we prayed that, thanked him for his time, and left.

We went across the street and hit 5 more older homes and found nobody at home. At this point, young Todd was having a blast, and the rest of us were enjoying watching him have fun. We decided to call it a day, went to the local diner for breakfast and pie and coffee, and talked.

All in all, a good experience – if not filled with God moments that we could spot. A few of them, but not a ton. I think we tried this too early in the day to be effective, but in any case it was fun to try.

The other two adults with me had never done any servant evangelism before, so it was a good break-in for them. They seemed to have a decent time. Nobody yelled at us to go away, or was negative in any way. We’ll continue to fine-tune this type of effort, and keep meeting more neighbors. I’d really like to do a neighborhood BBQ and hand out invites door-to-door in the same areas next.