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; we can help.

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.

 

 

Are you still telling people to “Call the church office for more information?”

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Don't call the church office for more information!
Don't make the church office person responsible for answering all the questions about information you didn't take time to put on your website.

Don't do that.

In this time of social media, texting, and the information explosion at our fingertips on websites, with our ability to write unlimited content and link to related information, I naively assumed nobody made the mistake of saying that in their church communications.

But then I was checking out a new website for a church that was doing a major re-branding (in what follows, the details are changed and location not given so as not to embarrass anyone). This church has been around for many years; it was a large, well-known church in the area it was in. The senior pastor retired and a new, young pastor came in (all very happily, no church fights or ill-feelings). The church changed its name away from a denominational label to a contemporary one. They decided to get a new website and hired a very expensive, well-regarded company to do it.

The website had beautiful graphics and lots of alliteration for all the areas of ministry. There was not a typo to be found.

All good. Well, not so much—the site seemed cold and mass-produced because it didn't have any pictures on it of real people on it (not even staff) and all the text seemed like a "fill-in-the-blanks-of-a-template"—but perhaps those negatives were because it was new and they didn't have time to put in pictures or content from real people. This isn't a design critique, so I'll leave it at that.

....No, I can't do that.....even if your website isn't perfect—be real. Have genuine pictures of staff, write a human, honest letter from the pastor why he/she hopes people come. Take pictures of your people at events, post them, and put in captions that will make sense to someone outside the church. People don't come to a church because of gorgeous graphics and flawless mission statements. They come to have questions answered, needs met, and to connect with fellow pilgrims.

I'm sorry, I digress, but this is important. We are trying to win people to Jesus and if the site seemed cold and sterile to me, someone who loves the church and is cheering on new churches and communications, I don't imagine it would have a very welcoming impact on someone who wasn't into church jargon—no matter how beautifully illustrated it might be.

Back to the topic....

What the site did have

The phrase "Call the church office for more information" or the more contemporary, but similar statement, "Email the church office for more information" was added after many descriptions of programs or events. If the activities described (and there were several pages of these) didn't have that statement that after each description of either the ministry or concept, it was at the bottom of the page. I can honestly say there was not one thing on the site that was completely explained in the brief overview of it.

What's wrong with this and what should have been done

It isn't fair to the people in the church office. Usually when this phrase is included excessively in a website or other communication piece it's because the people on staff or in the ministry didn't take the time to communicate fully what was going on when they wrote the information for the site.  The person answering the phone or email can't be expected to know every detail about every ministry. If the ministry didn't give the person doing communications all the details when it was first written about, the people in the church office won't magically know them now.

What should have been done: Don't talk about a ministry, value, teaching, whatever unless it makes sense (at least at a basic level) in the communication piece you first talk about it in. This doesn't have to be lengthy, but should contain basic facts of what's going on, when it meets, who it is for, if there is a cost.

In addition: Each ministry that is mentioned should have one person IN THAT MINISTRY who is committed to answering phone calls or emails or other social media contacts about it. Of course you can't put complete information about every event in the bulletin or in a mention on the website and a personalized contact of someone actually involved in the ministry is important. But making people go through a series of people or phone calls to find the person who actually knows what is going, or the answers to basic questions on isn't efficient or kind.

People will not take additional steps to find out about something they know little about. Making a vague statement along the lines of "Connections are very important at our church, contact the church office for how you can get connected" probably won't get a lot of response.

What should have been done: Realize people are very busy today and love them enough to tell them what is going as fully as you can the first time you mention it.

Back to the website overall

It looked like the first draft (though a very polished one) of the website. It was so perfect that you could almost see the drafts passed from staff member to staff member to make sure not a typo escaped. Or maybe it was written by the website company and presented in all its perfection to the church.

It would have been so much better, as stated earlier, pictures of real people; content that didn't read like it was computer-generated, COMPLETE descriptions of people or ministries. This church as been around for decades and there was no sense of history or of any of the people actually involved in the ministries.

Simply "having a website" isn't enough. Make sure your content, perfect or not, reflects who you truly are as a church and be sure all the people in it take responsibility for their area of ministry and can be contacted directly (whenever possible) about it.

Afterthoughts and a check of the Wayback Machine

I was very grumpy when I wrote this, but after re-reading it, I realized that more than grumpy I was terribly sad because I remembered the website of the church in the past. I remembered it (though I'd forgotten when I first started writing this) because someone I knew was doing a special program there and I wanted to check it out. The images of the site came flooding back to me. It wasn't nearly as polished or perfect, but I remember it was filled with great content, that I linked to for a study I was doing on a similar topic. The site overflowed with people who loved the church and were involved in ministry. I remember thinking how good the site was at the time instead of my current frustration with every page on it.

To make sure I remembered correctly, I looked up the site on the Wayback Machine (an archive for old sites) and again, the site was not nearly as fancy, but it was human. Messages from ministry leaders, lots of pictures of the people and ministries, and not once did I find a "contact the church office for more information." If there was a contact link (and there were) it was always to a specific person at the church.

This is not a plea for old-fashioned sites and a bashing of new expensive ones, but a reminder that looks aren't nearly as important as your heart when you are reaching out to people in any communication channel. Let your heart, your care for people and love for Jesus come through. Think about the people who will be answering questions about the information you leave out, be complete, no matter if it is a little messy and your site will be worthy reflection of the church instead of a frustration because of invisible people and incomplete information.