Skydiving Bunnies and the Easter Outreach Question

The Skydiving Bunny Is Not the Problem

There's a moment in a recent Christianity Today report on Easter outreach where you realize the story is stranger than the headline. Churches across the country are budgeting for helicopter rentals, record-setting drone shows, and — yes — Easter bunnies deployed by parachute. All of this is framed as community outreach during Holy Week, which in 2026 means competing for attention against a projected $24.9 billion in consumer Easter spending.

The usual responses to a headline like this break predictably into two camps: delight ("look how creative the church is getting!") or alarm ("what happened to the gospel?"). In my view, both reactions miss the more interesting question — what institutional pressure produces this behavior, and what does it reveal about how religious communities understand themselves in an age of relentless distraction?

I want to sit with that question honestly, because I think it opens onto something worth examining beyond the obvious culture-war talking points.

What's Actually Happening

Easter is, by nearly every measure, the church's highest-stakes annual moment. Research consistently shows that Easter Sunday draws the second-highest church attendance of the year, surpassed only by Christmas Eve — making it the closest thing American Christianity has to a guaranteed audience. For a sector watching that audience erode steadily, the holiday represents a genuine and shrinking opportunity.

Average weekly attendance at U.S. Protestant churches fell from roughly 137 people per congregation in 2000 to about 65 by 2020, according to LifeWay Research. That's not a blip — that's a structural shift playing out over two decades. Against that backdrop, a congregation with a functioning pastoral imagination looks at Easter and thinks: if we're going to reach anyone, this is the week. The helicopter and the drone show are answers to that pressure, and I think they deserve to be understood as such rather than simply mocked.

The Christianity Today piece describes churches investing in coordinated drone displays involving hundreds of synchronized aircraft, theatrical aerial events, and costumed Easter bunnies arriving by parachute. The explicit logic is straightforward: bring people onto the campus who would not otherwise come through the door, and a meaningful fraction of them will keep coming. That theory is plausible. Whether it's accurate is a different question, and one the available data answers with some ambivalence.

An Old Pattern in New Clothes

The church has never been shy about spectacle, and it's worth saying that plainly before we do anything else with this story. Medieval cathedrals were the drone shows of their era — massive, technically audacious, almost incomprehensibly expensive productions designed to provoke awe in people who had no existing category for the sacred. The Passion plays mentioned in the Christianity Today piece as a contrast to the newer outreach tactics were themselves radical innovations when they emerged in the Middle Ages, a way of dramatizing scripture for populations who couldn't read it. Christmas pageants, revival tents, stadium crusades — each generation found its own form of spectacle, calibrated to whatever the surrounding culture found impressive.

In that sense, the synchronized drone show is historically continuous with a very long tradition of the church using production value to get people's attention. Anyone who wants to argue that spectacle has no place in Christian outreach has to grapple with the fact that the greatest outreach tool in Western history — the Gothic cathedral — was primarily a spectacular experience.

What's shifted, I think, is the content of the spectacle. Every element of the cathedral was theologically dense: the windows, the proportions, the light, the height, the silence. The building was an argument about the nature of the divine made in stone and glass. It was spectacular and coherent. The drone show can be spectacular without being coherent in the same way, especially when the hook is a parachuting Easter bunny — a figure with no connection to the resurrection that isn't commercial. The bunny and the cross share a day on the calendar. They don't share a theology.

That's not a moral condemnation of the churches doing this. It's an observation about what gets communicated when you use one thing to introduce people to another.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

It's worth getting concrete about the competitive environment these churches are operating in, because it clarifies what they're up against.

American consumers are projected to spend $24.9 billion on Easter in 2026, making it a consumer event that rivals major retail holidays — and churches are competing in that same attention economy with drone shows, helicopter drops, and theatrical spectacle. The bulk of that $24.9 billion goes to candy, gifts, clothing, and food — the secular Easter economy that has grown substantially over the past two decades as the holiday's religious associations have faded for many American families. The church that wants to reach those families has to find them somewhere in that landscape.

A 2019 study by the Barna Group found that approximately one in five unchurched Americans said they would attend a church event if personally invited by someone they knew, and that number climbed when the event was framed as community-oriented rather than explicitly religious. That's a real pool of potential attendees — people who are not hostile to faith but have no current reason to walk through a church door. High-production Easter events are, in theory, designed exactly for that population.

The harder question is what happens after the drone show ends.

Does It Work?

Research on so-called "seeker-sensitive" church growth strategies — which went through a major boom in the 1990s and 2000s — gives a complicated answer. The approach can fill buildings, sometimes dramatically. It also has a documented tendency to produce what researchers call "shallow roots": people who identify with a church community without developing the practices — prayer, scripture engagement, service, confession — that tend to characterize durable faith.

The most striking data point here comes from inside one of the pioneering seeker-sensitive congregations. Willow Creek Community Church, which built one of the most influential large-church models in American history around accessible, entertainment-adjacent experiences, published an internal study in 2007 acknowledging that its own attractional model had produced large attendance alongside thinner spiritual formation than expected. The congregation described finding many long-time attenders who had not moved meaningfully toward spiritual maturity, and concluded that its programming had not created the conditions for that movement as effectively as assumed.

That's a remarkable moment of institutional honesty, and it's worth taking seriously. It doesn't prove that the drone show is ineffective outreach. But it raises a real question about what "effective" means in this context. If effective means "people showed up on Easter Saturday," the helicopter egg drop probably works. If effective means "people are in a living relationship with Christ five years from now," the picture is considerably less clear.

The pattern here is worth sitting with. Higher production cost correlates with lower theological coherence and, based on available research, with more uncertain long-term outcomes. That's not a law, and congregations with strong follow-up systems may well be exceptions. But it's a pattern.

The Institutional Logic at Work

Here's what I keep coming back to: the churches doing this are not cynical. They're anxious, and there's a real difference.

A congregation that rents a helicopter for Easter outreach is a congregation that genuinely believes its neighbors are worth reaching, that the message it holds is worth sharing, and that it needs to do something disruptive to break through the noise of a $24.9 billion consumer holiday. That's a pastoral impulse at its root, even when the execution looks indistinguishable from an event marketing campaign.

The pattern that interests me — and that I think is worth naming — is what happens when an institution internalizes the logic of the environment it's trying to reach. The church competing with the Easter candy aisle begins to look and sound like the Easter candy aisle. The congregation trying to out-spectacle the entertainment industry starts speaking the entertainment industry's language. And the entertainment industry's language, by design and by commercial necessity, is not the language of repentance, of sacrifice, of a body broken for sin.

There's a coherent version of this strategy: we go to people where they are, we speak a language they recognize, and then we introduce them to something they couldn't have found at the shopping mall. The Easter egg drop can be that — a community event that builds relational trust, opens a door, and creates an opportunity for a different kind of conversation. Many churches have used lower-stakes community events exactly this way, with genuine fruit.

But there's a different version that ends up being less about introduction and more about substitution — where the spectacle becomes the product rather than the door to one. And I'm honestly not sure that the churches running drone shows always know which version they're running. The gap between those two things is mostly invisible from the outside. It might even be invisible from the inside, at least until several Easter seasons have passed and someone looks at the retention numbers.

What's Actually at Stake

I want to be direct about something. I'm not interested in being the voice that tells churches spectacle is always wrong, because the history doesn't support that and because the alternative — irrelevance, empty buildings, communities with no witness at all — is also a genuine failure mode with real human costs. An empty church on Easter Sunday is not a victory for anyone.

What I am interested in is the question of coherence. The cathedral was coherent: everything in the production pointed toward the same thing. The Passion play was coherent: the drama served the story. A parachuting Easter bunny is, by its nature, incoherent — it borrows attention from something that has nothing to do with what the church is actually trying to say. And incoherence, in my experience, tends to produce confused results. People who come for the spectacle may not understand what they're being invited into, because the invitation itself is coded in a language that points somewhere else.

The deeper question — the one I think is worth taking more seriously than the drone show itself — is what these outreach choices reveal about how American churches understand the difference between attending a church and belonging to a faith community. Those are different things, and they require different conditions to develop. Spectacular Easter events are pretty well suited to producing the first. Whether they contribute to the second probably depends on everything that happens after the bunny lands.

That question is worth sitting with longer than the Easter season lasts.

Jared Clark is the writer behind Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry. For related reading, see The Attendance Problem Churches Keep Avoiding and When Church Growth Becomes Its Own Gospel.

Last updated: 2026-06-16