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.

The Six Benefits of reading (or listening to) the Bible in Chronological order and probably why you haven’t done it

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Thru the Bible In Chronological Order Lesson #1 6 Reasons Why Yvon's note: this is from my Bible Blog and podcast website: www.bible805.com. For all of 2019 my project was to first, share why we can trust our Bibles (lessons from history), and then to go through the Bible in Chronological order with my commentary on readings each week. I finished the project (whew!....) at the end of 2019, but all of the podcasts and notes are available for you on the site if you would like to go through the plan anytime. In the following year, I'll be doing various topical studies for the podcast each week. The reason I'm including this on the Effective Church Communications website is because Church Communicators need to be spiritually strong to communicate for the kingdom of God and to be spiritually strong, you must know God's Word. In addition to working in church communications, I have a Master's Degree in Church History, attended seminary, taught church history at a Jesuit university and love teaching the Bible. The podcast is available on iTunes and many other podcast channels. For links to all of them and to all of last-year's podcasts, go here.

Podcast Intro:

Along with losing weight, getting more done, simplifying your life and other commendable goals, is reading through the Bible one of your resolutions for the year? Do you know how many books are in the Bible?

If so, I’d like to share a way for you to do it that will change your life more significantly than any diet will!

Hi, I’m Yvon Prehn and Welcome to Bible 805!

Today we’re going t to talk about…..

The Six Benefits of reading (or listening to) the Bible in Chronological order, and probably why you haven’t done it

There are many ways to read through the Bible each year—but there is one that is by far the BEST way to do it (and I’ll be going into the reasons why it’s best shortly) and that is to read through the Bible in Chronological order. That means to read the books (or parts in some cases) in the order they happened, not the order you find them in the Bible.

Don’t worry about figuring that order out—I’ve got a schedule you can download to do it and I’ll be doing podcasts in the coming year to guide you through it. (starting Jan. 6 for 2019)

But for now, since reading through the Bible in Chronological order is a somewhat daunting task, it's worth asking why do it? To answer, ask yourself, why read anything, watch any movie, learn any new information in a certain order? [Read more...]

My recommendations for your spiritual preparations for Easter—and for the challenging work you do all year long

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Bible 805, podcast and commentary
To do well as we create church communications we need to know our message well and this Podcast will help you do that.

Creating church communications any time of the year is a challenge, but preparing for Easter is one of the most challenging because there is so much to do for the Easter season, starting with Lent and then all the preparations and finally the celebration of the most important event of the Christian year—the resurrection of our Lord.

For this and for all other times of the year I hope this site encourages you and give you practical tools to do your work effectively, but more important than all those things is that you need to ground yourself in the Word of God. For you to do truly effective work as a church communicator, you must be strong in your faith and the foundational way to do that is to know God's Word.

I often describe myself as a "writer and teacher for Jesus" and long before I started teaching church communications (and that was a LONG time ago) I was teaching Bible classes. In the many years, I've done that, as any teacher knows the more you teach the more you learn and I'm learning so much as I prepare my lessons for Bible 805 the class I do live each week at my church and also my PODCAST: Bible 805.

This last week in the process of teaching through the Bible in Chronological Order (which I think is an essential way to study it if you want to truly understand it) I did a lesson on Typology, where you learn how the types or spiritual truths that were shown in partial form in the Old Testament are fully revealed in the New Testament. For example, the lambs were sacrificed as an atonement (a covering) for sin in the Old Testament, but Jesus came as the perfect lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Imagine what it must have been like for the Jewish audience who followed John the Baptist and who for their entire lives had watched lambs sacrificed in anticipation of the coming Messiah to see him look up at Jesus approaching and to say, "Behold the Lamb of God!"

This is only one of the images we talked about and I got to thinking how much richer will be our experience of Easter if we understand the Old Testament background of it.

To strengthen your heart before Easter and to grow in your relationship to Jesus and knowledge of His Word I'd like to invite you to listen to Bible 805. The lessons and podcasts are posted by each Monday after the Sunday morning lesson. You can jump in at any time as the lessons are self-contained, but I pray many of you will join us in our adventure through the Bible. This is the message we all ultimately work so hard to communicate well. We need to do our best to learn it well.

The MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do this year—read through the Bible in Chronological order—and I’d like to help you do it

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Reading through the Bible in chronological order will change your life! I'd like to invite you to join me as I teach through it in Sunday School class and in a podcast in the coming year.

This falls under the category of putting your own oxygen mask on first before you help someone else.

YOU have to be spiritually strong if you are going to successfully serve in the ministry of Church Communications in the coming year. To do that, you need to be strong in God's Word and I know from many years of experience that the BEST way to do this is to read through the Bible Chronologically. I've done it this way for many years and this year I'm not only encouraging you to do it, but I started a podcast, Bible 805 that is available on iTunes and many other sources that will guide you through the readings.

The podcast initially has a foundation series of Podcasts, "Truth and History" series that goes through why we can trust the Bible by showing how it is based on historical truth.

Then there is a podcast on the Six Benefits of Reading through the Bible in Chronological Order, I also have a copy of the text below that you can use however you'd like (be sure to read it through yourself) and finally, starting next week (after you've done a week of readings) I'll do a podcast from the Sunday School class I'm teaching on this. I plan to do a weekly podcast on this every week this year (pray for me....).

To also help you and if you want to encourage your congregations, I've created two schedules for this way of reading through the Bible that you can download below, one is a full-year, one page schedule and one is a bookmark I'm doing for my church (but I took my church info off it) that I'll do monthly and pass on as I go.

The PDFs of both are below, click on either image to download the file: [Read more...]

For the heart of church communicators: Bible 805, a podcast about history and the Bible

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Bible 805, podcast and commentary
A Bible podcast and commentary from Yvon Prehn with an emphasis on church history and how it helps us understand the Bible.

Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, Jesus told us. It's valid to continue that thought that out of what's in our hearts is what will come out in our communications.

If our hearts are filled with God and his words, that will be reflected in our church communications.

It doesn't mean that we will only write devotionals and Bible lessons—though that might be part of it. It means that the tone, the attitude, the images and examples we use will be reflective of our Lord. The best way for that to happen is to so saturate your mind and heart with God's Word that his way of looking at life and reaching out to people will become second nature to you.

There is only one way to get that perspective and that is to spend time in God's Word and we now have a new and exciting way to do it through PODCASTS!

[Read more...]

And now podcasts—one more way to share encouragement, training, good news, our faith!

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Podcasts by Yvon Prehn
One of the oldest ways of communicating--with our voices is now one of the newest in Podcasts!

Who would have imagined the oldest way to communicate—with our voice—would be the latest, greatest thing in communications?

Even more, who would have imagined that one of the oldest technologies—radio—would be the basis for it?

But here we are with podcasts, a booming area of communications that literally anyone can do.

Effective Church Communications and podcasts

If you've been part of Effective Church Communications for some time, you know I've done a number of podcasts. I did a moderate amount of radio in the past, love the format and have done a lot of teaching and speaking so it seemed like a natural tool.

As with many things, the technology of it was very scary and that put me off for some time until I realized how simple it could be (this is an EXTREME simplification and I hope to do some videos to explain it more) with free Audacity and Lame software, plus an inexpensive headset microphone from Target (that's how I create mine).

Creating them was easy, what to do next was hard. I've tried various systems, all time-consuming and though the storage and distribution systems didn't cost a lot, it is a monthly cost. But the biggest challenge was HOW to distribute them? Yes, there are all sorts of ways to do that, but my brain was stretched enough just getting the podcast done and available.

Anchor changed everything

[Read more...]