CCM Coaching Tip #13: What Did You Do For Easter That Wasn't About Religion?

by Tommy Kramer, Kramer Media

Most CCM stations look at Christmas and Easter as prime spots to put Religion in the forefront - and that's fine. But what else did you do? More importantly, did things have to run through the "faith sifter" to get on the air?

My first memories of Easter were going to sunrise services in my hometown of Shreveport. In particular, the services held at the Centenary College amphitheater, a "Hollywood Bowl" type of design where every seat was a good one. Surrounded by 70-foot tall pine trees, the beautiful grounds of the Centenary campus, and several thousand pounds of red Lousiana clay - basically a gigantic Slip - N' - Slide mat for my sister Kathy, who seemed to fall down a lot when she was little. Oh, and for after the services, the delicious strawberry pie waiting for us just across the street at Strawn's Diner. (Yum!)

But those sunrise services were also where we saw all our friends from school in a different light. We saw our neighbors - the same people who used to holler at us for riding our bicycles across their lawns - enjoying the crisp morning air and discussing the sermon we heard that morning. Often, when we just went to our neighborhood church, after the morning service there was a church social - a box lunch with a chicken leg or a sandwich, cold milk, maybe a cookie. Then we'd run around playing "Red Rover" or some other game, getting permanent grass stains on our best clothes, and having a great time while our parents caught up on the latest happenings with each other, swapped stories of past Easters, and helped clean up the area before they lugged us home and made us take our second shower of the day.

Were those stories on the air Friday or the Monday after Easter? Were those pictures on your station website, or your jocks' Facebook pages, or Snapchat? If not, why not? My wife still has pictures of Easter eggs that we decorated years ago - including one on which I drew what I had hoped to be a picture of Christ, but it turned out looking more like Groucho Marx.

If all you saw on Easter was a chance to serve up serious messages about Jesus' resurrection, you missed an opportunity to share all the other ways that Easter allows us to CONNECT on a level that few other days afford.