Effective Church Communications

FREE Valentines Day templates, ideas, plus a reminder to church leaders to be nice to church communicators

15 January, 2026 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Valentines to remind us of God's love — We all need to hear how much God loves us. These communications will help you share that.

Here is a list of links to articles and resources to help your church make the most of Valentine’s Day. Though many of the resources are specific to Valentine's Day, a number of the cards and ideas are useful any time of year you feel your congregation and community need to be reminded of God’s Love.

Templates: Valentine’s Day Outreach Postcard with room for Church Info

https://wp.me/pDky9-6OU

Valentine’s Day Templates

Below are the sets of Templates with preview images, click on the link at the bottom of the list to go to them.

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/templates/valentines-day-templates/

Valentines for Church Communication Creators, what church leaders need to do

https://wp.me/pDky9-19E

***PLEASE note—this one is formatted for you to print off (just hit the little print button at the bottom of the page) and give to church leaders. Not terribly subtle I realized, but tell them I made you do it.

Templates: Door Hangers for Valentine's Day Outreach, plus why they work so well for outreach

https://wp.me/pDky9-6OH

Community Outreach for Valentine's Day—a door hanger sample and a postcard

https://wp.me/pDky9-5FQ

These are real-world examples from a contributor and dear friend of our ministry Gayle Hilligoss

Templates: Valentines for believers, remember how much Jesus loves you!

https://wp.me/pDky9-6Oh

Templates: Valentines for believers, remember how much Jesus loves you!

15 January, 2026 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Valentines Encouragement Cards — Sometimes we forget how much God loves us--these cards will help us remember.

Sometimes before we can share the love of Jesus with others, we need to be reminded of it ourselves. Below is a set of Valentines Cards to encourage believers in Jesus how much he loves us and how we should love others.

The set is free and is in a downloadable ZIP file after the images. The ZIP files contains both PDF images and the original editable MS Publisher file.

The message below can be printed on the back of the cards, or used in other ways for Valentine's Day Outreach:

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be all about love—but, truth be told—it is often about disappointment.

Disappointment comes from human love, which may be wonderful, but somehow
always seems to fall short of our expectations and dreams.

We may blame it on Hollywood and the media, on unrealistic images, unobtainable fantasies, on novels and dreams. But, though our expectations and dreams may have flawed foundations, maybe it isn’t bad to be disappointed in human love.

Maybe it is a realistic reminder that we can never expect human love to fill the place in the human heart only God can fill.

When we realize that God loves us unconditionally, totally, fully, when we rest and rejoice in that, an interesting thing happens. . . . . .

The human love we get from imperfect humans isn’t disappointing anymore. Because God loves us in our imperfections, stumbles, and short-comings, He can help us love others as they really are, not as fantasies, but as real people as flawed as we all are.

When we accept and give His love, it’s a Valentine better than chocolate—relationships not built on disappointing dreams, but on honest, satisfying, acceptance of each other.

Images of the Valentine's Day Cards:

To download the ZIP file of the images in PDF format and MS Publisher format, CLICK the following link: Valentine Cards quarter page Believer encouragements

Valentines for Church Communication Creators, what church leaders need to do

14 January, 2026 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Valentines Day, a reminder of God's love — Gifts are wonderful, but at Valentine's Day the most important thing is how we treat each other.

(For pastors, church business administrators, church communication directors, and anyone else who oversees people who create church communications--this is addressed to you. In addition, it is useful advice for church communication directors of volunteers. For all of you in similar positions, church communicators don't need more chocolate; they need the things I'm about to talk about....well maybe them AND some chocolate.) First is the video and then the longer text version of it.

by Yvon Prehn, www.effectivechurchcom.com

Valentine’s Day is a wonderfully Christian holiday in that it is all about love and loving is what Christians are to be about. We celebrate it by giving gifts, often flowers and candy, to those we care for—but flowers fade and candy adds on pounds. For those in a leadership position, who want to show caring to the people in your communications ministry, whether paid staff or volunteers, below are Five Valentines you can give that will have lasting, positive results. Print this off and discuss it during a staff meeting for a Valentine's Day that is a real gift for growing our relationships with each other.

Gift #1—Give them authority

In church communications, the church leadership should decide on basic themes and messages and perhaps even the overall look of publications, but seldom on layout, or the final editing of articles or announcements. The people actually doing the creative work need the final authority in these areas. Have a meeting to discuss and clarify these issues and then publicly announce and print your decision. You might say something like this:

"Jenny Smith, our communications coordinator has final editing authority on the layout, deadlines and content of materials that go into the bulletin, newsletter, website and church social media (and whatever else you want to list). She has posted her guidelines and submission deadlines on our website. Please support her decisions and deadlines."

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