Every year, Easter presents one of the greatest opportunities a church has, not just to gather a crowd, but to disciple one. This year, our Creative Department asked a simple question early in the season: What if we gave our church something to hold during Holy Week? The answer became the VOUS Easter Devotional.

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Starting Early, Starting with Intention

We began ideating in January. That runway matters. When you start early, you're not just buying time for design and printing, you're giving your team the space to think spiritually before they think logistically. The devotional wasn't born out of a production meeting, it was born out of a conversation about what our church actually needed during the most sacred week of the year.

If you're a church looking to create something similar, our first encouragement is this: start earlier than feels necessary. A resource like this touches communications, design, theology, print logistics, and environments, and each of those teams needs time to do their best work.

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Landing on a Framework

Once we committed to the concept, we anchored everything to our Easter theme: "Who Is This Man?" a question we wanted our entire church to sit with prior and through Holy Week. From there, our Communications Team mapped out each day from Palm Sunday through Resurrection Sunday, researching what historically and scripturally took place on each day.

We knew we didn't want a generic devotional. We wanted something that would pace the reader through the weight and beauty of Holy Week, day by day, moment by moment. So we built a consistent daily framework:

• 1–2 key scripture references grounding each day in God’s Word
• An encouragement section connecting the historical moment to personal faith
• A standout statement - one bold, memorable line to carry through the day
• 3 reflection questions designed to invite honest self-examination
• A blank reflection space for the reader to write what God was speaking to them

That last piece matters more than it might seem. Giving people space to write turns a resource into a record, something they can return to long after the week has passed.

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Activating Your Team

Once the framework was established, we activated our Communications Servant Leader Team. Each team member was assigned a specific day to write for. This distributed ownership across the team, kept each voice fresh, and made the process scalable.

Every submission went through a review process, checking for flow, consistency, and most importantly, theological accuracy. If you're building something like this, don't skip the theology review. A devotional carries weight precisely because people trust it with sacred moments in their lives.

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Design: Making It Feel Like Your House

Our team built a template in Canva that allowed copy to be dropped in consistently across all pages. The design goal wasn't to produce something flashy, it was to produce something that felt real. Cohesive with our Easter look and feel, but warm enough to sit in someone's hands during a quiet morning.

The devotional went through several design iterations, but the heart never changed: deliver a resource, not just a product. There's a difference, and your community will feel it.

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Distribution Across Every Location

On Palm Sunday, our Environments Team displayed the devotional across all four of our locations. Physical copies were available for people to take, but we also made a digital version accessible for our broader community ensuring that anyone, anywhere, could walk through Holy Week with us.

We also included a Spanish translation, making sure our Spanish-speaking community could engage with the resource in their language.

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What We'd Tell Another Church

You don't need a massive budget or a large team to do something like this. What you need is:

1. A clear theme that ties the resource to where your church is heading
2. A consistent daily structure that's simple enough to repeat and rich enough to hold weight
3. Writers from within your team who know your community's voice
4. A design tool (Canva works) and a brand standard to anchor it to
5. A plan for both physical and digital distribution

The VOUS Easter Devotional reminded us that discipleship doesn't have to happen only from a stage. Sometimes it happens at a kitchen table, on a morning commute, or in a quiet moment before the day begins. A well-crafted resource puts something in people's hands that the Sunday experience alone cannot.

Take a look at the full VOUS Easter Devotional here.