Read first please

A conversation, not a lecture, a membership site of a different sort

I created this site because I want you to learn how to be an extraordinary communicator of the gospel of Jesus. I want you to be able to share this forever good news with passion and skill. My prayer is that your church communications help your church  fully fulfill the Great Commission, that people come to know Jesus and grow to maturity in Him.

To do that takes more than enthusiasm—it takes training. It takes more than a flashy tip  or design resource sent out periodically—it takes the hard work of patiently learning craftsmanship in a multitude of communication skills.

The question then—how to help church communicators do that? After much prayer and pondering, a membership training website seemed the best way to both train the most people possible and to make a living that would enable me to do it. Many more hours of research showed me that training sites are a popular Internet enterprise these days. Since they run the gamet from wonderfully useful (think www.lynda.com) to the rotten (unnamed), I thought it might be good to clarify the approach of this site and what it is not:

***Not one with content dripped out slowly

*** Not one whose disguised purpose was to sell some affliliate scheme

***Not one with boring lessons

***Not one with predetermined structured objectives—some really good sites do that, but in church communications folks come with all kinds of reasons for wanting to learn

Instead, what if we did training as a conversation?

I got this idea from one of my favorite books on communication, Information Anxietyby Richard Paul Wurman. The following quote, which I have chopped up a bit to suit my purposes, perfectly describes my approach:

There is only one method for transmitting thought, for communicating information in a manner that somewhat captures the spirit of the mind: the medium of the conversation.

Conversation can be a mirror of the mind, a petri dish for ideas. It enables us to communicate our thoughts in a manner that most closely models the way they occur in our minds. . . . . conversations are not bound by principles of logic, transition, and clarity.

The spontaneity of conversations prevents them from being edited to a sterile purity. The lapses, nonsequiturs, and quirky associations . . . characterize the best conversations . . . nor are we as likely in conversations to succumb to scholarly posturing. . .

I love the image of training as conversation. You have a conversation with a person. A conversation isn’t a mindless drip of timed marketing or the phony format of some kind of outcome based learning. It’s more like the conversations I remember best with fellow students and teachers, the give and take of graduate seminars, of minds challenging, interacting, bringing up ideas, sharing thoughts.

I want to have conversations with:

• The church communicator who needs inspiration for a communication piece that’s been done the same way since the founding of the church.
• The pastor who has no idea where to start in dealing with church communications, especially in this computer age. When you went to seminary, the computer wasn’t even invented, let alone things like blogs and websites.
• The pastor who grew up with computers and but doesn’t know how they mesh with a biblical view of communications or how to gently communicate with people who don’t tweet or text.
•  The church secretary who wants to create quality church communications, but who has enough trouble mastering the computer program and who has no training in design, typography, or communication creation.
• The trained designer who can’t figure out why church people don’t appreciate her brilliant work.
• The church business administrator who must balance the budget with the communication needs of the church, if he could just figure out what they are.

I put all this together with people like the ones above, people like you in mind. You have all come to my seminars. I see your faces. I remember our conversations, your frustrations, successes and sometimes tears. I pray for you often and fervently. I want to continue our conversations on this site and start new conversations with church communicators I haven’t met face-to-face.

Continuing my conversations with you became my model for the structure and content of this site.  Please remember, as Mr. Wurman said that “conversations are not bound by principles of logic, transition, and clarity.” Though I have tried to assemble  materials in beneficial ways, they are far from perfect either in my organization or execution.

The conversations here take lots of forms: sharing ideas and teaching, showing samples, rants and raves in my blog section.

Limitations of the material here

In the organization of this site, I will sometimes repeat material if a topic seems to fit well in two or more areas. The material will seldom be presented in a prescribed order because I don’t know what you need to learn first on a given topic. I work hard to write clear and complete titles and headlines, so you can organize your learning by what you need.

In how the content is presented,  I have materials from training church communicators going back to the early days of the personal computer and the only format some of these are in are imperfect PDFs. I would love to redo them into updated and flawless formats, but I felt the content was useful enough to make the material available now instead of keeping it on a disk somewhere until I had time to redo it.

There will be typos and sentences that don’t make sense. I apologize. Proofing perfection and proofing procedures are works in progress. Again, I felt getting the basic information available to you was the priority.

The repetition of conversation

I frequently and in a variety of ways talk about the importance of repetition and of multi-channel communication and I’ve tried hard to follow my own advice on this site. In practice that means that some topics and/or examples are used more than once. In conversations, we often repeat ourselves and I do the same on this site, for example:

• In teaching you about certain topics, some of the same material is on the website, in books, in downloadable samples, organized with different topics in different ways.
• Sometimes I have samples or training available in a variety of formats: on the website, in a book, in a podcast, on a video.
• No two pieces are ever exactly alike, but if I really like an example, I’ll most likely show it to you more than once.

No scholarly posturing

One more caveat: I quite loved Wurman’s comment “nor are we as likely in conversations to succumb to scholarly posturing.” I do have a degree in Education (and in English, an MA in Church History, grad work in theology, communication and assorted subjects ) and do know how to do the sorts of educational posturing loved by those who favor formats. I have been a graduate student, a high school teacher, and a college professor and confess to my share of “scholarly posturing.” But this is not the approach I wanted to take on this site.

The wisdom of that choice was confirmed to me when I recently reviewed a church communications book by a PhD. who was teaching communications on the university level, while also trying to do communication work in the church. Though there were some useful bits and pieces in the book, overall the tone of the book was one of immense frustration because people in the church never seemed to do things the way the professor felt they should be done. She had plans, schedules, and precise procedures and spent an inordinate amount of time griping in the book about how nobody would do what she told them to. Bless her heart and the hearts of all who teach in the hallowed halls of academia, although there is a place for precision and lecturing, demanding perfection often isn’t very useful in the church office.

Conversations are. Conversations are person to person, sometimes meandering, but I know in the case of my communication conversations with you, always with the goal of coming alongside, helping you, giving you ideas and encouraging you in your church communication.

I’m doing this because I know that in the church office, in the communications you create, the eternal destinies of people are influenced. To come alongside, to equip and encourage you in that task, I offer you neither perfection, precision, or scholarly posturing, but content that is a series of conversations from my heart.

PLEASE join in the conversation

I don’t want this site to be a one-sided conversation. PLEASE join in!

Content expert contributors will be added as we progress, but all of you have expertise to share. Please add your comments to the articles, share in our Great Idea Swap, and when we get the Forum up and running (I hope soon), please participate.You can always email me at: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

One more thing: always, let’s bring the Lord into our conversations. Please  pray for this ministry and your fellow communicators that all our conversations about Him and as we share Him be worthy of the calling we’ve been given to share the message of eternal life.