By Eddie Pipkin

Hold on to your pilgrim hats, but Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I always like to write a blog about celebrating gratitude (and I know you’re thankful to hear it).  Oh, sure, you’ll be tipping your hat to gratitude in worship over the next couple of weeks, offering a juicy Thanksgiving prayer or two and maybe even posting a challenge to comment on “what makes you thankful” on your obligatory social media posts.  But c’mon, people!  Let’s step it up a notch!  With so much calamity and chaos this year, it’s a great time to give people some interactive ideas to really lean in on celebrating their gratitude.  What the world needs now is thanks, sweet thanks!

There are oodles and caboodles of great ideas a google search away for how to introduce interactive gratitude elements into your social media, worship, and small groups for the next couple of weeks.  In a year that has brimmed with so much nonstop bad news, don’t miss these opportunities to let people reflect on and express the many blessings to be celebrated in spite of all the chaos.

Most anybody you ask will acknowledge that such blessings exist (and even that there have been unexpected silver linings) among the dark clouds of 2020, but it’s a mental (and often begrudging) acknowledgement that really needs to be lived out in kinetic expressions in order to feel real.  It’s one thing to know we should be grateful (just like we know it’s good to eat healthy and get some exercise), and it’s another thing to be generically grateful (which is really akin to an amorphous thankfulness for just having survived this crazy, crazy year), but it’s quite another thing to express that gratitude in very specific ways, especially public expressions of that specific gratitude.

Think back to six months ago when yard signs and driveway drawings were all the rage, very public expressions of love and support to frontline workers and passing neighbors.  Now such signs and drawings are far less frequent, or they’ve become faded and wilted with time.  Well, such “signs of the times” never go out of style.  Maybe we could start with a revival of all that earlier sign enthusiasm, and your congregation could be the very group to get such a revival going for your community!

I mentioned earlier the ubiquitous moments we offer folks to “comment on something you’re grateful for,” but we can give them a fresh challenge by offering more specific interactive opportunities.

How about a link to an article about “7 Surprising Health Benefits of Gratitude.”  You might have shared something similar before, but if you’re looking for a daily dose of gratitude fresheners, it’s a great reminder.

There are oodles and caboodles of great ideas a google search away for how to introduce interactive gratitude elements into your social media, worship, and small groups for the next couple of weeks.  In a year that has brimmed with so much nonstop bad news, don’t miss these opportunities to let people reflect on and express the many blessings to be celebrated in spite of all the chaos.

Most anybody you ask will acknowledge that such blessings exist (and even that there have been unexpected silver linings among the dark clouds of 2020), but it’s a mental (and often begrudging) acknowledgement that really needs to be lived out in kinetic expressions in order to feel real.  It’s one thing to know we should be grateful (just like we know it’s good to eat healthy and get some exercise), and it’s another thing to be generically grateful (which is really akin to an amorphous thankfulness for just having survived this crazy, crazy year), but it’s quite an additional thing altogether to express that gratitude in very specific ways, especially public expressions of that specific gratitude.

Think back to six months ago when yard signs and driveway drawings were all the rage, very public expressions of love and support to frontline workers and passing neighbors.  Now such signs and drawings are far less frequent, or they’ve become faded and wilted with time.  Well, such “signs of the times” never go out of style.  Maybe we could start with a revival of all that earlier sign enthusiasm, and your congregation could be the very group to get such a revival going for your community!

I mentioned earlier the ubiquitous moments we offer folks to “comment on something you’re grateful for,” but we can give them a fresh challenge by offering more specific interactive opportunities.

How about a link to an article about “7 Surprising Health Benefits of Gratitude.”  You might have shared something similar before, but if you’re looking for a daily dose of gratitude fresheners, it’s a great reminder.

Or how about offering up a Gratitude Quiz to help them think about their underlying discipline of regular thanksgiving and appreciation for the blessings of their lives.  This quiz is what the pollsters call a “push poll,” which means that it’s really more about planting ideas in people’s minds: it’s a mindfulness exercise about ways we can practice daily gratitude.  The one I linked here is also one of the ideas offered up in a nifty collection of such ideas in an article called, “3 ways to encourage gratitude in the church,” from the United Methodist Communications website.

A couple of other ideas they include there are encouraging gratitude journaling (which works very well for a specific timeframe challenge, such as a month) and the infamous “21 day complaint-free challenge,” which is as soul-refreshing and eye-opening a quest as ever undertaken by a dedicated disciple.

Here are some COVID era specific creative ideas for gratitude expression:

  • Have people pick up an extra face mask when they join you in person and use a sharpie to write something they are thankful for on the face mask, then put it on.  It’s a fun and very public way to count a blessing.
  • Challenge people to write down things they are grateful for (on social media or on a handout or on a white board or chalk board or newsprint in a public gathering space) directly related to the pandemic era: one of those “silver lining” examples.
  • Have people give a social media shout-out or publicly name during prayer time frontline workers they are grateful for (including medical professionals, grocery stockers, teachers, law enforcement, etc.).
  • Have people call someone (or even better video chat with someone) who has been isolated for months, so they can express their gratitude for those persons.
  • Host a “baking up gratitude” challenge where you make some goodies and drop them off at someone’s doorstep with a note of thanks (for whatever) and challenge them to pass it on.
  • Provide people with a t-shirt or oversized button or badge (or give them the supplies to make their own as part of this activity) which says, “Ask me why I’m grateful!”  Then challenge people to wear it in public and be prepared for a response when people inevitably inquire.
  • Encourage people to do a “gratitude interview” with a friend, family member, co-worker, or convenient stranger.  Ask them what they are grateful for, and don’t let them get away with generic answers like “family” and “health.”  Ask them to go into specifics about why they are grateful for those things — it’s a great conversation starter and a way to get to know people better.  Make notes and share what you learn with your small group.

Here are some tried and true expressions of gratitude that never go out of style:

  • Have kids do gratitude coloring pages and then post them all along the entry halls to your worship space or post a daily art entry to your social media for a couple of weeks.
  • Host a gratitude photo contest and post up entries during worship and on all your social media feeds.  People can take pictures of all the things for which they are grateful.
  • In small group settings (or even small or medium worship settings), make gratitude bags and set them around the perimeter of the room — just like Valentine’s bags!  Then provide note paper and pens and encourage people to write expressions of gratitude and drop them in other people’s bags.  You can even do a virtual version of this where you encourage people to use the chat feature of Zoom gatherings to write thankful comments about one another or issue a challenge for folks to email people in the group personally to express gratitude to them.  Or you can challenge them to post random thankfulness posts on people’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
  • Encourage people to write gratitude notes and slip them under the windshield wipers of cars of people they know — or even random strangers, for whom we can find creative neutral ways to be thankful!  Or even more directly personal and living out Jesus’s call to “love our neighbors,” they can post thank you notes (and little baskets of goodies or gifts) to their actual, geographic neighbors!
  • Encourage people to write their own Prayers of Thanksgiving and pray them for a week, as well as sharing them with friends and family.
  • Encourage people to do a “shopping with gratitude” challenge, in which they concentrate on observing BOGO offers in which they keep one item and donate the corresponding free item (some people to this as a regular practice).  It’s a great season to try it out.

The point is that we are acting on our feelings of gratitude in real and practical ways.  Sometimes meeting such a practical challenge really opens up our thinking about the ways we are truly thankful — and as you know from clicking that link to the healthy benefits of gratitude and having read your Bible which emphasizes the vital role gratitude plays in discipleship, direct expressions of gratitude lead to a right mind, a refreshed soul, and an abundance of blessings.

What are some nifty ways that you are celebrating expressions of gratitude at your local church during this challenging season?  Share your ideas here in the comments section as well as links you have discovered to other great resources.  We like to be a repository of practical and useful ideas for all who are in the important work of ministry.