Wish I could swap places with you Soozi. I'd love six hours of silence at the moment. 
Seriously though, you may find it gets easier the longer it goes on, counter-intuitive as that sounds. I was thinking about when (pre-kids) I used to do long journeys on the back of dh's motorbike. At first, not being able to listen to the radio or argue with talk to one another, like you can in the car, is weird and a bit boring. But after a while it becomes easier to just cling on for dear life sit there and let your mind go blank and think random disconnected thoughts and just 'be'. I find it hard to do that in 'real life', but when there is literally nothing else that you can be doing it gradually becomes possible to let go of the invasive everyday thoughts (Have I put the bins out? I'm cold. Must buy milk. That colleague really annoyed me yesterday. I'm really cold. What shall I wear tomorrow? Mustn't forget to hand in DD's school trip money. I'm freezing. Etc. Etc. Etc.). I'm not saying that I necessarily had any huge epiphanies that popped into my brain to fill the space left by all that nonsense, but I don't think that that matters: clearing the space is itself a positive thing. And obviously you're doing this in a specifically religious context, which is very different from sitting on the back of a motorbike.
Also what DutchOma said... in a fraction of the number of words and far more eloquently.
MHD Starting from scratch must be really tough. I am full of admiration for what you are doing there. I have been thinking about this, and I think you probably do need to start by building up the personal contacts first, at least in a small way, and then using them to help you to follow up after any larger events that you can organise. Will you be able to use Christmas (after all, the time of year when people who don't think about it at all between January and November do sometimes turn to the church) as a springboard for some events and maybe reaching out to some new people? Is there any scope for working with schools in the area, perhaps offering to support some of the things they'd be doing anyway for Christmas? What would be good would be to use Christmas as a way of reaching out to a larger number of people, but then having some sort of follow-up in January and February to try to maintain the contact with (some of) those people so that they don't disappear again till next December. What about a post-Christmas unwanted/duplicate present swap party? (This only works if the people don't know one another and are not going to come and try to swap stuff that other people in the room have given them... Get this wrong and it could turn quite nasty 
) So you invite people to bring along any unwanted or duplicate presents, and for each one they bring they can, if they wish, take away something that someone else has brought. Alternatively they can just donate them (likewise if they don't see anything they like) and afterwards you give them to some local good cause (hospital, etc.). That keeps the Christmas connection, is Christian in a 'caring and sharing' way, and enables you to maintain the connection...
Disclaimer This may be a totally mad idea. This is not really my area of expertise. Feel free to say 'There there TUO!', pat me on the head and shoo me away...!
As you can tell by the length of this essay post, I am doing work-avoidance. 