Effective Church Communications

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and a Biblical Perspective to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. Our tools constantly change; our task doesn’t; Effective Church Communications can help.

How to train churchcom ministry volunteers

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church communication volunteers
Recruiting volunteers is just the first step in assembling a team to help with the church communication ministry and here you'll learn what else is important.

Few church offices have enough time or people to get done all the communications they know they need to do to adequately inform and instruct their congregation and to get them involved in ministry activities that will help them grow to Christian maturity. Rather than complain or cut back on communications, one solution is to train a team of volunteers to help. That suggestion can be terrifying, but in what follows I’ll share strategy and tools that make it possible. Not easy, but possible.

First divide your communication ministry into two levels

Before we discuss the specifics of training tools it’s important to divide your church communication ministry into two levels because one of the greatest concerns churches have is that volunteers won’t do an acceptable job or won’t meet the overall standards expected by the church.

This is a valid concern, but it can be solved by dividing your communication ministry into:

#1 The PR Level

#2 The Production Level

The PR Level is the top level that encompasses the communications that define the church: the website, the church bulletin, the overall newsletter. This level has the strictest guidelines in quality and because of that, the work done by church staff.

The Production Level varies in communications, but it has items such as postcards, flyers, misc. communications from individual ministries within the church. This level can vary in quality (be realistic, you don’t need the same care for the postcard reminding the men’s ministry of a workday as you do the Sunday morning bulletin. There are lots of communications that are important to get people involved in ministries, that remind, educate, and encourage, and these are ideal projects for volunteers.

Prepare Guidelines and Templates

Two more things need to be in place before you launch your training program. [Read more...]

National Day of Prayer flyers and bulletin inserts for all countries and for any year

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We should continuously pray for our leaders and nations and these flyers will give you a way to remind your congregation not only on the National Day of Prayer, but whenever you want.

The National Day of Prayer in the U.S. is the first Thursday in May of each year, but our prayers for our nations, wherever they are shouldn't be confined to one day. Keeping that in mind, I created a set of flyers or bulletin inserts you can make up for your congregations. Some are specific to America, but I made a couple for my many friends and Effective Church Communications Members in Canada and the majority can be used by anyone anywhere.

I also intentionally created these without any specific date so you can use them any year.

You can print them up as is and then on the back put whatever local or church gatherings you have to pray.

Below are images of the flyers and below the image is a link to the PDF file of the flyers.

CLICK the following link to download the PDF file of the flyers:  PDF Nat Day of Prayer flyer

 

Is your church marketing failing because of the lack discipleship in your church?

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Our personal discipleship and effective church outreach
Could our main challenge to effective church outreach be the person in the mirror?

The goal and North Star of Effective Church Communications is to "Fully fulfill the Great Commission" which means helping people to not only come to know Jesus as Savior but to grow to mature disciples. And though that is our goal, the following, incredibly challenging article, thoughtfully links the lack of success in our church communications to the lack of discipleship in our lives.

Following is a key quote from it and click the link below to read the entire article:

To put it simply, we don’t have a marketing problem, we have a sales force problem. Study after study reveals American Christians simply don’t believe in our product anymore. Can we turn it around? We believe we can, but not until we get serious about living the kind of life that astonishes the surrounding world. Remember in the gospels how people were “astonished” at the message of Jesus? But 2,000 years later, how many people are astonished at our message or our lives today?

 

8 Ways for Christians to Regain Credibility

How invisible church jargon can sabotage your website

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Dangers of Church Jargon
We might think we are communicating clearly on our church website, but are we?

Jargon, those insider terms that are only meaningful to members of an "in" group, in this case, those of us in the church can be deadly in terms of our success in communicating with the world outside the church. It's easy forget what a powerful tool the web is for reaching our world, or that many people who visit your church for the first time do so because of your website. With the importance of the website in outreach, even in how we use jargon and fine-tuning it out can make an importance difference.

With that in mind, I just finished a brief overview of websites and following are a few notes on some instances of jargon that stood out to me. We know church jargon can be deadly in the other communications we create in the church, but somehow I think it's easy to miss jargon on the website because the medium itself is newer. Though the websites I looked at all had overall great images and content, the desire to be brief in the number of primary menu items used on the home page, made the jargon in them glaring to me. But if this is the first place a visitor looks and if the primary menu items contain one or more examples of church jargon, this may confuse or stop a visitor.

What's tricky here is that it’s almost impossible to catch this yourself on this because those of us who work in the church are so immersed in church jargon we aren’t even aware of it when we use it or we may not realize that people outside the church may not use that word in the same way. Here a few examples (far from exhaustive) of terms or the locations we put them in that we might want to reconsider: [Read more...]

An opportunity to pray for unchurched family members for Mother’s Day

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Family members who don't come any other time of year may visit your church for Mother's Day. Here is a bulletin insert or flyer you can use to encourage your congregation to pray for them.

Flowers and candy are nice, but for many Mothers the desire of their heart is that those family members, spouses and children who don't know Jesus would come to Him. Mother's Day is a fantastic opportunity to reach out to these loved ones and the bulletin insert/flyer/or text however you want to use it is a way to involve your church in praying for them.

Below are images of the flyers and below them is a link to a ZIP file that has PDFs of them that are ready to print and use, editable MS Publisher files, and jpeg images for you to use to share in publications encouraging your congregation to pray.

CLICK the following link to Download the ZIP file: Mothers Day Prayer Bulletin insert or flyer

Text from the handouts

Below is the text from the handouts for you to use in any way you want, no attribution or credit required:

Our church has an opportunity to pray with Mothers in preparation for Mother’s Day because out of all the Sundays of the year, this is the one Sunday unchurched children and spouses may come to church to make Mom happy.

So below is a place for you to list the names of people the Mothers you know would like you to pray for. Ask for prayer requests and remember to not only ask biological Mothers, but the many spiritual Mothers in our church, who may have spiritual children in their lives that are precious to them and who they want to come to know Jesus.

In addition to praying for the guests who come, pray for our church body to put our prayers into practice by focusing on our unchurched guests on
Mother’s Day. Pray we will all be welcoming, that the sermon will touch hearts, that we will provide materials for unchurched spouses, children, and friends to explore the Christian faith.

And most of all pray that this Mother’s Day will be one that will bring the greatest joy imaginable to a Mother—the knowledge that those she loves will spend forever with her and Jesus.

For even more motivation to make the most of Mother's Day, please check out this video

Video of How to make the most of the spiritual opportunities of Mothers Day
This video can totally change how your church celebrates Mother's Day and can make it into a time of significant outreach.

Click on the image to go to the video and notes on the Church Communications Training School. Please take time to watch it with your staff and discuss it—it can totally change how you approach Mother's Day. If you are a member of the Church Com Training School you have permission to show this video and make copies of handouts to the staff or any church communicators group you are part of without the rest of them having to be members.