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.

Dos and Don’ts for a successful launch of a men’s ministry

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Men's Ministry Do's and Don't
Father's Day is a great time to launch a Men's Ministry and here are some tips to help you do it effectively.

Father’s Day is a great time to focus on and do PR to grow a Men’s Ministry. Growing a Men’s Ministry is one of the most challenging tasks for church communicators, but it can be done and Father's Day is a great time to work on it. Below is advice that goes through the true story of what an otherwise large and successful church tried and didn't work and what they needed to do to make a Men's Ministry launch successful.

The following excerpt is from my book, Ministry Marketing Made Easy.

Real life story about the limitations of prayers and good intentions

True story here: a church, in a town which shall remain unnamed, was experiencing great numerical growth. It had grown from 600 to over 1800 in attendance in three years. The Sunday service was spectacular, with seeker-sensitive music, drama, and powerful need-centered preaching. Individuals were making decisions to become a Christian every week and the church was growing in numbers. They were doing many things right. Though grateful for the growth, the church staff was concerned because the growth was primarily in the Sunday morning service.

The leadership realized that people also needed to grow in Christian maturity as well as their primarily passive involvement in the Sunday service. The staff decided to address this issue by beginning a men’s ministry, where they could intentionally work to develop the men into mature disciples. They decided that the kick-off event for the men’s ministry would an evening when they would start a new men’s Bible study group. They felt that getting the men of the church into an in-depth Bible study was an important foundation for discipleship. So far, so good. Now, how to get them there?

The staff prayed about the kick-off event. They advertised it for four weeks in the bulletin and newsletter, on PowerPoint and through lively announcements from the pulpit every Sunday. After all their promotion and prayer, the staff expected at least 100-200 men to show up. The night came for the event. The twelve men from the church staff and the planning leaders enthusiastically set-up tables and chairs for 200, expecting a great response. Three men came. What went wrong? The staff did all the right things, spiritually. They followed a biblically sound ministry model, they planned and prayed, and then they prayed some more. They held more meetings and prayed more. They advertised the way they advertised other events in the church, but admittedly the church was doing little else other than Sunday morning. [Read more...]

A tasteful, subtle card to help deal with a big problem—pornography addiction in the church

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You can be free card
No matter what, we have freedom in Jesus and here is a practical card to help members of your church find it.

You don't need another listing of statistics to  convince you that many men, even in your church have a problem with pornography. The challenge is how to help them in a graceful and effective way.

The solution is very simple and I can't take credit for it, it is an idea from a church communicator who attended one of my seminars. I was thinking about this as I was preparing the materials for Father's Day and thought it would be a good time to share it

Here is how she described the ministry solution for porn addiction used by her church

We realized that we wanted to reach the men of our church with solutions to pornography issues, so what we did is we created business cards with websites on them where they could get help. We also had information about the programs our church had on the cards. The challenge then was then how to get them to the guys.

What we did was install the small, stick-on business card holders inside the men's restroom stalls. That way they could pick one up, put it in their pocket, and no one else would know.

It seems to have worked—we refill the card holders often.

With that as inspiration, I created the card to the left. It is simple and gets to the point.

You could also add additional resources from your church, pastoral or counseling help, or support groups that minister in this area. Assure members of confidentiality in any interaction in the church and be sure you stick to it.

To download the Free for everyone  ZIP files that contain the MS Publisher and PDF files for the basic cards, click on the following link: Problem with Porn Business Card Image

Bonus for Effective Church Communications Members

Though the plain card will carry out the goals, for this card or for others you use to promote ministries that help people, I created the following set of cards that you can use for the front of these cards or for any others you create. Here are images of the cards:

Below is the link to download the ZIP file for these cards.  [Read more...]

FREE Father’s Day social media images

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Father's Day FREE Social Media Images
This is one of the set of FREE Social Media images available for you for Father's Day.

Images are a great addition to social media to attract attention to our messages. I created the following images for you based on the set of Father's Day invitations (CLICK HERE to go to that set) you can use to invite people to Father's Day events.

I also did this as an experiment and would appreciate your feedback. I usually have images in jpeg format in the ZIP files for the various publications. I do that so you can use them if you want to advertise the event perhaps in your newsletter. However, I know that the jpeg image is often not large enough or of a high enough resolution if you want to use it for some social media. Therefore, I created the set of images below in Canva. They were created in the Large Pinterest size. I resized the Square set and the Facebook set in Canva, which is why the layout is shifted somewhat.

For the small Pinterest set, I resized them in Paint.net which keep the layout spacing intact.

Below is a gallery of the Inspirational social media images. The size sets below have all of the gallery examples. Following the gallery example, you can see the actual screen size of the images in sizes for:

  • A small Pinterest Image
  • A featured or large Pinterest Image
  • A Facebook Image
  • A square image for Instagram or other programs that prefer this type

Click on the image examples below to download the ZIP file of whatever size image you like.

Gallery of all images

Sizes and downloads

Please continue reading for these images, some are very large. Click on the size image you want to download the ZIP file of images in that size. All of the designs above are in each set. The size description is below the images.

[Read more...]

INSPIRATIONAL Postcard invitations for Father’s Day

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Free Fathers Day Invitation
Click on the image to download this Free Invitation.

No matter what your church as planned for Father's Day, you need invitations to get them there and we've got some for you.

These invitations,  which are half of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet and that print 2 per page, have a challenging verse for Dads on the front and then on the back you can add whatever details you want about what your church has going on for Dads. They can be printed on light-weight cardstock and mailed or given out.

If you want just one, the one to the left is free as a downloadable PDF. Click on the image to download it.

All the designs below are part of a ZIP file below the gallery of additional images. The file has ready-to-print PDFs of all the designs, plus editable MS Publisher files and jpegs of all.

CLICK the following link to download the ZIP file of the invitations shown above:Fathers Day Invitation

 

How to communicate with an audience that has no time to listen

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Remember time stress when creating church communications
Remember the time stress of your audience when creating church communications.

Need some evidence that it isn't just your imagination making you feel nobody has time for anything related to the church? "At the end of the weekend, you are more than a full day behind in your activities. Even if we went to an eight-day week you still would be 4.5 hours behind." Was the conclusion of an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Ed note before I continue: I wrote this article several years ago and while updating the website ran across it. The time challenges of your audience today make it worth another look because though a few years have passed if anything the situation of time demands has become even more challenging as we attempt to reach people. Following is a reprint of the article with a number of updates added.

An article in the Wall Street Journal reported Americans work an average of 53 hours a week. Dale McFeatters took that statistic and calculated that if an individual did all the activities reported such as sleeping, TV, dressing, etc., without multitasking, that person would have a 28.5 hour a week time deficit. In addition to helping explain why we often feel stressed and tired, his calculations help explain why it is so difficult to get people respond to the communications from your church. Following are some ideas on how to communicate your church's message to a time-stressed and time-starved audience. [Read more...]