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.

Why just “Come to Easter at Our Church” isn’t enough–FREE invitations with short, but powerful messages

By Leave a Comment

The images in this collection are the least important part of them. Much more important is the message that reminds people why Jesus is the reason for the Easter Season.

I'm part of several church communication discussion groups and recently people have been sharing their outreach ideas for Easter. They all look great, but I am concerned that many of them simply say something like "Easter at whatever the church is." Now there is nothing wrong with that if you go to the church and want your people to know what time your services are being held. But there is a challenge with an invitation like that if you want to use Easter as a time to reach out to your community.

Not everyone knows that Easter has anything to do with anything spiritual

We often talk about how we need to remind people that "Jesus is the reason for the season" at Christmas, but no matter how secular the Christmas celebration, most people still know it had something to do with the birth of Jesus even if they don't think of it as particularly meaningful.

It's not like that for Easter. Biola University quoted a Barna study that shared statistics similar to many other studies:

About two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans surveyed related the holiday as something religious or spiritual. But just two percent said they thought it was about the birth of Christ and another two percent said it was about the rebirth of Jesus. Only 1 percent related it to the second coming of Jesus, while 3 percent just thought it was a celebration of spring or a pagan holiday.

Looking at the non-religious segment, 13 percent of Americans said they were not sure how to describe Easter. Many of their recurring answers were spring break, rebirth, hiding eggs, candy, children and bunnies.

http://chimes.biola.edu/story/2010/mar/23/easter-barna/

Don't do a bait and switch at Easter

If, as the above statistics show (and they are a few years old and I imagine the situation has gotten even worse) few people outside your church have a true idea of what Easter is about, if you send out something that only says something like "Come to Easter Celebrations at our Church" your audience will be thinking chocolate and brunch—not a challenging message and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus from the grave.

To not only give people an idea of what Easter is all about, but to get them thinking, asking questions about life and death and faith, I created some Easter invitations with thought-provoking messages.

There are many ways to use the invitations:

  • You can print them up as postcards as is or you can use any image you want with whatever message you want. An idea for how to get postcards out to your community without the church paying for postage is below the set of images.
  • You can use a related image and swap it out on the postcard layout.
  • If you have your own branded Easter theme, fell free to use the message part with any image you have.
  • I also have a separate file of just the text. You can use the text message in a newsletter, social media, or any way you would like to get the message out there.

Below the set of images is a ZIP file that has all the invitations in PDF ready-to print format and editable MS Publisher files. PLEASE CLICK on the first image below and it will enlarge to show you the text that goes with the images.

To download the ZIP file of the invitations, CLICK the following link: Easter INVITATIONS 2017

For a FREE file of the text alone that goes with the cards, CLICK HERE.

How to get out Postcards cost-effectively and in a way that will help your congregation grow in their faith

You can print these invitations at your church and then on Sunday put 5 invitations in everyone's bulletin. During the service the pastor can stand and say,

"As you can see you all have 5 Easter invitations in your bulletin. I know you've prayed for friends to invite to our Easter services and here is a tangible way to do it.

You can either mail the invitation or hand-deliver it to your friends. After that continue to pray and follow-up.

Offer to drive your friends to church on Easter and invite them to brunch afterwards to see if they have questions. You can invite them back next week and encourage them to become involved in the church on a continuing basis.

We all know we should be sharing our faith in Jesus and this is an easy and enjoyable way to do it!"

To start the motivation process to get your congregation excited about inviting friends, go to this article: Why it matters if you invite your friends to Easter services

Easter is the most important holiday of the Christian year—let's to all we can to fully involve our congregations and reach out to our community at this time.

A Free Template of the Christmas Story and short gospel presentation based on “Hark the Herald Angels Sing!”

By 1 Comment

Christmas evangelism bulletin insert size
This is a set of bulletin insert-size Christmas evangelism publications--please share!

This has been one of our most popular communications for Christmas—it's an upbeat, but thought-provoking presentation of the good news about Jesus for Christmas based on the popular hymn, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" and I wanted to share it with you this year.

When I first created the piece it was a full-size sheet and in a 3-panel brochure format, but after sending that out (CLICK HERE for original article and for 8 1/2 x 11-inch size flyers and for brochure size) I got a request to create a bulletin insert-size piece. What a great idea! And I was happy to do that. The images are below and below them a ZIP file for everyone to download ready-to-print PDFs, the editable MS Publisher file, and images of the pieces.

I wrote it and created the communications and you have my permission to share or use it in any way you want.

Be creative in how you use it

Of course, you can print them up and use them at Christmas outreach events or as a bulletin insert.

You can also copy the text or the entire communication and share it on social media for your church or personally.

It's also useful to make copies for your congregation to put into their Christmas letters. Either with the templates here or the ones in the link above (where there is a full-page version), you have my permission to upload any of the PDFs to your church websites for your people to download to print at home and share with their friends and family. I've printed them out for my Sunday School classes and people have greatly appreciated it.

Encourage your congregation to put them into their Christmas cards or enclose with gifts (remembering Jesus is the greatest gift of all!).

[Read more...]

Super Important–Last Minute, FREE TEMPLATES for Christmas Connection Cards, and communications to get people to return after Christmas events

By Leave a Comment

Christmas connection card
Even more important than getting people to come to our Christmas events is getting them to come back. This will help.

Wouldn't it be great if just one fantastic church service, event, or sermon could assure that unchurched visitors would come back to your church, learn about Jesus, come to know Him, and become a member of your church? When we create our invitations to Christmas and other special events, we silently hope they will help do just that.

Though we work hard, hope, and pray for great spiritual success, we know one great communication or the event it points people to probably won't do all we wish it would.

Eugene Peterson described the Christian life as "a long obedience in the same direction" and I think successful church communications fit that description. We want to bring people from outside the church into it, involve them with the life of the church, help them to come to know Jesus, and grow to be a mature disciple. It takes many communications online and in print to do that.

Getting people to the Christmas eve or day service or other special event is great, but making sure they come back is even better. To make that happen you need more than the invitation that got them there.

To help you do that, we have a number of communication ideas and free templates that can help. Some will help you get contact information, others will inform people about your church, others challenge them to think about Jesus as more than a baby.

Following are descriptions of essential Christmas Communications along with strategies for using them. The ZIP files below each example contain ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files. You are free to use them in any way you want and to pass them on. All the artwork and text are copyright legal. Or you can use any part of them for inspiration and create your own or pull out the text for digital or social media sharing.

Christmas Event Sign in and Registration Card

One challenge with special events is how do you get people to give you their contact information so you can follow-up. Especially at events where people are moving around, they probably don't want to sit down and fill out a card. Here's an idea we've used these very successfully when we host a Christmas or other holiday event--we do drawings for great door prizes!

One Christmas we had big table at the door and an assortment of wonderful gift baskets. Some had food, others pampering items, all were gorgeously wrapped. One church I know has Target gift cards they give away at all events for when people fill out their information for a drawing.

We are always upfront with people about why we are doing this and what we want the information for. Following is the message on the card; you can also take this message, enlarge it and put it in a literature stand by the cards, when we do that, we have no problem at all with people signing up:

We are so glad you’re here! Please take a minute to fill out this card so you can be entered into our door-prize drawing and so that we have a record of your attendance and a way to contact you about future events for your family. Be assured this information will not be shared or used outside the church office and you can have your names removed from the list at any time by calling the church office.

Following are images of the templates that we have. [Read more...]

Summer Connection and Door Prize Drawing Cards, free MS Publisher Templates

By Leave a Comment

Free Summer Connection Cards
These cards are a great way to get information from summer guests so you can invite them back to activities year round!

Many of your churches are holding community outreach events in the summer. You have a great expectations for them, but often you don't see much church growth after them because you don't work to intentionally connect with the guests who come. This is VERY EASY to do if you offer a great door prize and have people sign up for it.

Below is a set of combined connection and door-prize drawing cards you can download, run off and use. In the download is a set of Free MS Publisher Templates, ready-to-print PDFs, and images.

Click the following link to download a ZIP file of the cards: Summer Connect & Door Prize Drawing Cards

PLEASE read this article on the incredible difference cards like this made for the summer outreach of one church: Why it isn't enough to be a community-friendly, free event-providing church

Colorful, fun church reminder postcards for Summer

By Leave a Comment

Summer church reminder postcards
Remind people in fun ways about what is going on at church this summer with these cards.

A light touch, a gentle reminder is often all that is needed to let people know what is going on at church during the summer and to help you do that, I revised some summer postcards I made with www.tagxedo.com, a fun site you can use to create word cloud images that you can then place into any publication you are working on.

The cards below were designed as reminders or notes that you can send out to remind people of what is going on at the church. Make them up for Sunday School Teachers, Small Group Leaders and Pastors to write a few notes a day to various church members. Summer is time for fun, but the best of times are often with our church families and these cards can remind people of that.

Below the illustration of the cards is a downloadable ZIP file that has ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files.

To download the ZIP file for the images above, click the following link: Fun Summer postcards