Is Your Church Ready for Holiday Crowds? 3 Ways to Prepare Your Church Facility for the Busy Season.

Remember a few years ago when churches were empty and everyone was watching online? The return to in-person services was slow at first. By 2022, it was around 85% of pre-pandemic norms.

This year, it spiked. 

In April, many churches reported record-breaking attendance. Barna found, for the first time in data-driven history, men are leading the charge in the return to the pews. Even better? The biggest age group involved in this trend is young adults (Millennials and Gen Zers).

Something is stirring in the church in 2025, and it’s important for church leaders to prepare for the good times ahead as the busiest season of the year approaches. Along with prepping sermons, orchestrating choirs, practicing Christmas plays, and planning end-of-year giving campaigns, make sure you’re thinking of the nuts and bolts elements of a holiday service. 

Is your building ready to accommodate the crowds? Is it set up to provide a high-quality first-time guest experience at church? If you aren’t sure, here are three steps you can take to make sure your facilities are ready for the holiday crowds.

1. Audit Your Building(s) for Capacity and Flow

It doesn’t matter if you have a single location or you’re a sprawling regional multisite operation. You want to consider every square foot of each facility you operate before the crowds start pouring in.

How can your current church buildings accommodate higher foot traffic? Do you have SOPs (standard operating procedures) for church crowd management? Does your team know about them? 

This is an important step before you start doing anything. Take the time to assess and look for cost-effective improvements that can optimize crowd movement and minimize the need for people to ask basic questions, like “where’s the bathroom?” or even worse, “where’s the auditorium?”

Put up clear signage. Add a digital floor plan to your site. Schedule staggered service times to reduce parking lot congestion. Use volunteers to strategically greet and guide guests through your building. Wherever you can find it, look for the low-hanging fruit that maximizes attendance capacity and eliminates bottlenecks.  

2. Activate Underused Spaces for Seasonal Ministry

While you can take steps to manage crowds in your church’s regular spaces, you can also look for more space to work with temporarily. This is where building activation becomes important. 

Obviously, you can’t tack a new wing onto your church before Thanksgiving or expand the auditorium by 15,000 square feet before your Christmas Eve service. But that’s okay. Often, you don’t need new spaces, as long as you can make your current space work more efficiently. At Ministry Solutions Group, our team always says: When you can’t get more space, look for ways to use the same space more. 

Evaluate how you’re using your current space. Then look for low-use areas you can temporarily tap into. Convert underutilized classrooms into church overflow seating. Set up pop-up hospitality zones in your fellowship hall or lobby. Make sure you have services streamed to your cafe seating areas.

Every situation is different. Every building is unique. The goal is to find ways you can use every square foot of your building strategically for engagement and growth during one of the busiest times of the year.

3. Leverage Data to Anticipate Attendance Patterns

Understanding your data enables better decision-making. It gives you confidence to assess your church’s functionality and take competent steps to keep everything flowing.

There are plenty of little data details that can take away some of the decision fatigue as you try to decide how to prepare for the holiday crowds. Use simple attendance metrics, like last year’s holiday and pre-holiday attendance. Then compare it to current attendance and see how it lines up with your parking and seating capacity. 

Do you need to add an extra Christmas Eve service to get everyone in without going over maximum occupancy? Do you need an extra 15 minutes between services to let the parking lot turn over?

Data-driven facility readiness models are core to how Ministry Solutions projects growth for our partners. As you consider your internal data, look at the larger church landscape, too. Are trends indicating higher or lower attendance from last year in your region, denomination, demographic focus, etc.? 

Bonus tip: If you want the absolute latest cutting-edge research, sign up for the Future of the Large Church 2025 survey. We’ve partnered with Warren Bird and Generis for this benchmark five-year study, and the results, which release in early December, will have a huge impact on ministry planning for 2026 and beyond.

Planning for Church Crowd Management for the Holidays

As people show up at church in growing numbers for the holidays, the last thing you want is your church building to restrict the impact of your ministry. You don’t want someone to leave early because they can’t get a seat. Even worse, they might never come in because they can’t park the car.

Take the time to understand your church’s crowd-preparedness before the holidays get here. Don’t stop there. Use the holiday surge as a test case for long-term facility utilization. Use this preparatory phase and the busy weeks ahead to start asking questions about how your facility can best serve your ministry (not the other way around) in the year ahead. 

Measure your post-holiday engagement and crowd management as a litmus test for where your ministry is thriving and where it needs fresh investment to accommodate growth.

If you need support parsing through the data and making your plans, our team can help. Reach out for a Free Analysis. We’ll help you look at things like giving trends and heat maps so you can plan with confidence, both for the holiday rush and the year to follow.