Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.

PODCAST & blog—Your Chaplain of Communications—the unique ways Yvon Prehn and Effective Church Communications can serve you

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Comfort from Chaplains needed in church communications
Chaplains comfort and encourage in many situations and I want to be your Chaplain of Church Communications.

There are many useful resources available online to help you in your work as a church communicator. Considering that I was recently thinking about what makes my ministry of Effective Church Communications useful for you—what to expect from me that is unique or different from what is available from other sources.

Though I’ll break it into practical parts for you shortly, overall, I realized a good label for me would be Your Chaplain of Church Communications. This covers what I do, as a chaplain is defined as one—

  • Who provides spiritual care and resources
  • Is a mentor and a reassuring and trustworthy presence
  • Who assists with the spiritual, religious, and emotional needs

Caring for your spiritual needs and providing resources for you as a church communicator is foundational to what I do for two reasons:

  1. The spiritual importance of who you are as a church communicator.
  2. The unique ways I can help you be more effective based on the spiritual, Biblical foundation of the resources of Effective Church Communications.

Let’s look at these two areas in more detail now either by listening to the podcast or going to the blog that follows.

The spiritual importance of who you are as a church communicator

As a church communicator, you have one of the most critical jobs in the church both in terms of the potential impact of your position and the spiritual warfare involved in it. [Read more...]

Foundational lessons to grow your church in numbers and your people in spiritual maturity

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The following lessons can radically change how your church communicates and the results of it. These also form the foundation for much of the teaching from Effective Church Communications which is based on the goal of helping your church create communications that will fully fulfill the Great Commission.

The videos are on the Effective Church Communications YouTube channel and I'll be posting more videos regularly.

Please subscribe and share the resource with other church communicators; they won't get training like this anywhere else.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing, a strategic and sequential plan

The 5 Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

This is a strategic and sequential plan that will take people from outside the church and grow them into mature disciples.

Most churches work hard on communications, but they are often done without direction towards the overall goals of the church. This training will change that and give you a vision and North Star for your communications to all work towards fully fulfilling the Great Commission.

Successful Seasonal Strategies

Churches put on great seasonal events and often get a great turnout.

However, though they expect people will come to the church the following Sunday, that often doesn't happen.

This will teach you how to change that and grow your church in numbers and at the same time grow your people in spiritual maturity.

How the 5 Steps and Successful Seasonal Strategies Work TogetherHow the 5 Steps and Successful Seasonal Strategies work together

Both of the strategies, the 5 Steps and Successful Seasonal Strategies work on their own and they work together even better—this lesson will show you how.

You don't have to be familiar with the two other lessons to benefit from this one, in fact, this can be a good overview and then you can watch the other two later.

The books mentioned in the lessons and more are at:

https://www.payhip.com/ECCLibrary

Strategy #1: Clarify and commit to your objective—for ECC it is The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

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5 Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing
This book will give you a comprehensive plan to use your communications to take people from outside the church and grow them to mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

INTRO note: the following is from the preface of the book on The Five Steps which is an overview of our approach to church communications. We we are different than many other church communications resources in a number of ways and this book is a good explanation of many of them.

In addition to the information in the book, the Effective Church Communications ministry (though the name has changed) is somewhat unique in that it's been around a LONG time—since before the internet and social media were used in the church.

Yes, we were able to communicate back then, amazing as it may seem—but seriously, because of that our training is about much more than how to be great at the latest tech tool currently in vogue. Though we keep up with and encourage the use of every means to help people come to know Jesus, we know that it takes a foundation and a vision beyond current trends to accomplish all we need to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

That is why a biblical strategy is so important. Our tools can and will change, our objective and strategy won't. What follows explains the North Star, our ministry objective we keep our eye on as we create training and resources for you.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

Author’s Preface—the North Star of this book

There are many fine websites and resources today for church communicators and churches benefit greatly from these varied resources. In this mix, it might be helpful to clarify the North Star of Effective Church Communications, the ministry behind his book, and the foundational goal of it which is:

How to create communications that will help your church fully fulfill the Great Commission.

This is the one goal around which everything we do revolves. The time-lapse image above of how all the stars revolve around the North Star instead of every star going in a different direction illustrates what we are trying to do. We want to help churches chose a North Star and intentionally revolve all their communications around it.

Our North Star was chosen in obedience to the Great Commission Jesus gave us in Matt: 28:18-20 when he said:

 “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

North Star, to fully fulfill the Great Commission
Just as all the stars revolve around the North Star, so too all our communications should revolve around fully fulfilling the Great Commission. The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing will help you do that.

Fully fulfilling the Great Commission means that in addition to helping people come to know Jesus as Savior, your church helps believers become mature disciples of Jesus. Anything less is incomplete obedience. [Read more...]

The 5 Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing, redone, simplified, essential

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The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing
This is a way for you to put all your work into a strategic, progressive system of church communications that helps people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples.

Throughout human history, voyagers in the Northern Hemisphere have used the North Star, that one fixed point in the sky, as a reference for navigation. And though in the church office, you don't rely on a physical star and though not all communicators throughout the world can even see it, it remains a good analogy for all of us that we need a fixed point to keep our eyes on so our work accomplishes the goal our Lord wants us to reach.

For church communicators that fixed point, our North Star, is the Great Commission, where Jesus told his followers and says to us today:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20

We can summarize this command by saying we are tasked with:

  1. Helping people come to know Jesus as Savior
  2. Helping them grow into mature disciples

Both are commanded, but unfortunately many churches today stop short of developing their people into mature disciples. That is incomplete obedience.

As a corrective to this, for Effective Church Communications, our North Star and the one strategic and practical goal we have for all church communicators is:

To create communications that will help your church fully fulfill the Great Commission

The key phrase here is fully fulfill. Your communications should not stop at just bringing people into the church and involving them in uplifting worship services. They must help people become disciples.

How to do that?

Through The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

The Five Steps is a progressive way to organize and order your communications to take people from outside the church to mature discipleship. Here they are:

Step #1: Invite

Step #2: Inform

Step #3: Involve

Step #4: Instruct

Step #5: Inspire

The progression in evangelism or discipleship is not always obvious or explicit. An invitational postcard or social media post doesn't say "This is Step 1 and we are inviting you to an event where you can consider Jesus."

A clear podcast and notes on How we got our Bible and why we can trust it doesn't say, "This is Step 4 and you are being instructed in the Christian faith so you will become a mature disciple." But prayerfully progress is being made and lives are changed bit by bit.

I've been working on this system for decades and it has proven to be effective and inspiring to the people who have seen it in books, seminars, and online.

As part of my recent reorganization and updating of the ministry, I simplified the chart that illustrates it and following is the result. Following that is a link to the online class that explains and goes through the chart, though I trust the chart itself will make sense and help you see how you need a progression of church communications created with the goal of continuously moving people to the next step of Christian maturity.

Please download and share the chart.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing Chart

Click on the image to download a copy of it.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

 

Declining church attendance and how your communications can help turn that around

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Stop Declining Church Attendance with Your Church Communications by Yvon Prehn

 

Church attendance is declining both in fewer new people coming to church and current members coming less often—that’s our challenge.

You know that the solution to this challenge isn't going to be solved by a 500-word blog post of bullet points about the latest and greatest tech tool or social media to come along that will solve all your church communication problems and get people flooding back to our churches. You know you won't be able to get people returning to church if you can simply find more contemporary graphics or upgrade to a more cutting-edge look to your website.

But we keep hoping don't we?

What follows is not a quick read filled with magic solutions. It will take time to read, digest, and plan out implementation because the issue of declining church attendance and retention is not an easy issue to understand with easy answers to fix it. There are many parts of church theology, growth, and health that factor in and what follows is not an all-inclusive solution, but one that can make a big difference in reversing this trend. [Read more...]