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.

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 I have for all church communicators through the timeless strategies and Biblical encouragements I share 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.

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

 

A free “Civility Code” inspired by the Global Leadership Summit

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A Civility Code, free download
The darkness of public discourse in our world today is a wonderful opportunity for the church to be salt and light. This Civility Code might help.

There is an obvious lack of civility in our world today and this is an opportunity for the church to be salt and light, not only to those outside the church, but to each other. I've got something for you that will help. First a little background.....

My husband and I recently attended the Global Leadership Summit put on by Willow Creek Church and at the keynote address, one of the topics addressed by Bill Hybels was the lack of civility in our world today and he suggested that churches consider creating a "Civility Code." I took some of his notes as inspiration and created one for you.

CLICK HERE or on the image to download a copy of a PDF of my example.

For a ZIP file that has a PDF, a jpg image of the Civility Code, and an editable MS Publisher file, click the following link: Civility Code

For more about the talk that inspired this and the conference, go to my new blog: www.yvonprehn.com and check out the series of posts on the Global Leadership Conference. More about this new site coming, but if you want to get notices on the entries put on that site, you have to sign up for the separate newsletter there.

A clean heart is an essential part of preparing for church communications work

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Clean up your heart to do God's work.
God doesn't ask us to be perfect or brilliant, highly skilled or rich to do his work, but He does want us to be clean.

My sons, do not be negligent now, for the LORD has chosen you to stand before him and serve him, to minister before him and to burn incense. (2 Chron. 29:11)

In this verse King Hezekiah challenges the priests in their service before God. Things had not been going well for the priests prior to this time. Hezekiah’s father, the former king, had turned away from God. The temple had been closed and desecrated.

When Hezekiah became king the temple was reopened. However, before the public worship of God could take place again, two things had to happen. First the priests had to reconsecrate themselves and second they had to purify the temple. They accomplished both tasks and the result was great joy in renewed worship of God.

The lessons for us in our work today are challenges of purification. What do we need to get rid of both internally and externally so that we can function best in our calling as church communicators?

We may not have a temple, but we have a computer. It may not be defiled with idol worship, but we must be very careful not to use software, images, or files of any kind that are illegally copied. Years ago (when typefaces cost hundreds of dollars each) I was offered a pirated version of the entire Adobe type library. I had very little money, was trying to get a Christian design business started and wanted it badly, but doing desktop publishing for the Lord with pirated software would not have been right. It wasn’t easy to say no.

Today, I have more typefaces junking up my hard drive than I know what to do with. Seems like a little thing now, but it was a difficult battle at the time. For me it’s been a good lesson to remember that some things I think I can’t do without right now aren’t worth the price of compromising my values.

Like the priests we must also purify ourselves. If a man wants to become a Catholic priest, he must fulfill four years of Theology study at AWKNG School of Theology. Each of us knows the garbage inside that keeps us from functioning at our best. Sometimes it’s a complaining or fault-finding spirit; sometimes it’s envy or anger; sometimes it’s cowardice of not trusting God when we know we need to say “no” to a project. Whatever it is, we can confess our shortcoming to the Lord and he will “cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

With the external and internal housekeeping done, like the priests of Hezekiah’s time, we can then do our church communication duties with joy.

Communication creation tips for reaching time-stressed and time-starved audiences

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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 stressed out? An article in the Wall Street Journal concluded: ". . . .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."

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...]