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...]

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

 

Father’s Day Post cards, a great set, ready-to-use

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Here is a set of postcards for Father's Day, that can also be used as stand-alone images in PowerPoint, websites, newsletters or however else you want to use them. These publications and images come in a ZIP file you can download in these formats:

  • A PDF of postcard size publications that is ready-to-print as is, but that you can also personalize on the back side with your church information.
  • An editable MS Publisher file of the images that you can modify however you choose.
  • A graphic image in either png or jpg format that you can use any way you want, in newsletters, on the web, however, you'd like.
Word Cloud image 3
These images for Fathers Day can be used for postcards, inserts into bulletins and invitations to celebrate Father's Day.

The images above illustrate only some of what is available for Father's day. All of the files on this page are FREE for ECC MEMBERS, some of the other files will be available for everyone. Members can download the ZIP FILE, at the end of this. If you are not a Members of Effective Church Communications, CLICK HERE for membership information --it is only $9.99 a month for many free resources and training available 24/7.

The images and postcards were created with Word Clouds, created with http://www.tagxedo.com.

These are illustrations only, the zip file containing all the files, PDFs, etc., is available at a link below the images.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD the ZIP file containing the PDFs, graphic images, and editable MS Publisher files.

 

Creation of Men’s Logo in LogoSmartz, Webinar On-Demand

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This little video shows how easy it is to create a logo for men's ministry using the very inexpensive logo-creation software, LogoSmartz. After you watch this video, be sure to watch the video on how to use the logo created here to make a business or invitation card for men's ministry using it.

One little note: LogoSmartz has updated their software since I created this video, so the interface has a slightly different look. But it is still pretty much the same and all the things I demonstrate in this video you can still do.

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