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.

Invitation cards to invite people to come to church

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This invitation is free for everyone, just click to download a PDF of it.
This invitation is free for everyone, just click to download a PDF of it.

The creation of the cards below was inspired in part by these statistics:

  • "82% of the unchurched are at least somewhat likely to attend church if invited" –Dr. Thom Rainer, The Unchurched Next Door

  • Yet only 2% of Christians EVER invite someone to church!

In addition to the challenge of the quotes above, we know we should all be about inviting people to church as a step on their journey to a relationship with Jesus.

Effective Church Communications has a set of FREE invitation cards in PDF format. You can print your specific church information on the back.

The resources in the ZIP file below are:

  • A PDF file of all the cards, ready-to-print
  • The original MS Publisher file (2007, you can open it in later, but I know a lot of people still have this) so you can modify anyway you want and add your church information on the front or on the back.
  • Hi resolution images of the cards
  • Low resolution images of the cards

A link to download this file is at the end of the article.

Below is a gallery of all the cards from Effective Church Communications:

Back to Church Invitation Cards Card 2 hi res Card 3 hi res Card 4 hi res Card 5 hi res Card 6 hi res Card 7 hi res

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To download the ZIP file that contains all these cards in PDF and original MS Publisher format, click on the link below, download the zip file to your desktop, then click on it and use the files.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ZIP FILE for Back to Church Invitation Cards.

A grief-ministry free communication resource created by a fire-fighter’s widow

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Families of the Fallen ebook
This well-written and helpful e-book is available by clicking on the image and downloading from the Families of the Fallen website.

Ministry to widows is a ministry dear to our Lord's heart and one that defines us as Christians:

The Christian who is pure and without fault, from God the Father’s point of view, is the one who takes care of orphans and widows, and who remains true to the Lord—not soiled and dirtied by his contacts with the world. James 1:27, NLT

But as important as we know that ministry is, we often struggle with how to make its application practical in our churches. Fortunately a widow of a fire-fighter, Susan VandePol, took her pain and turned it into a beautiful and extremely helpful resource for others. She contacted me via LinkedIn and shared her e-book: Families of the Fallen. You can download the e-book, by going to the website: http://www.familiesofthefallen.net/

There are two versions of the book, one for Firefighter's families and one for churches.

Website is also an excellent communication example of beautiful brevity and impact

The website for the book is a beautiful example of a simple, focused, and extremely useful site. It is a tiny site in terms of size, but it is tasteful, lovely and provides appropriate information.

Many thanks to Susan for sharing and please, if you have materials like this that I can pass on to the readers and members of Effective Church Communications, send them to me at: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

The Lord has given us all different experiences and we can all share and learn from each other.

Outreach Church Bulletin inserts, an idea you can use all year around

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Church Bulletin inserts can be great outreach tools
Church Bulletin inserts can be great outreach tools--check out the 5 minute video here to see how!

Churches go all out at Easter in outreach and in inviting people back to church after Easter. Though it's wonderful to do this at Easter, outreach needs to be a priority always. Obeying the Great Commission isn't only for special events. Bulletin inserts can intentionally give people information that tells them about the church and gives them a reason to come back. The inserts can highlight programs and upcoming events that might interest visitors.

The short video here shows two samples of real church bulletin inserts that were used at Easter to do this but that could be easily adapted to any Sunday. They were sent in by ECC Members. PLEASE send us any samples you have with permission for us to use them. We all learn best from the experiences of each other. If you have some you'd like to share, please check out our Great IDEA SWAP!

Update note: though the basic flyers are great, Microsoft no longer lets you access clipart (bummer, some of us still like it), but you could find the clip art on other sites and put it in.
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Sample: Flyer for volunteer recruitment for a Thanksgiving outreach, a useful example for any seasonal ministry

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Thanks Giving Volunteer Recruitment flyer
This is a copy of a flyer used to recruit volunteers for a Thanksgiving outreach. We need to communicate clearly all we've planned if we want people to help. You can download a PDF of this flyer at the link at the end of this article.

It is challenging to plan a ministry outreach for any holiday and even more so when we want to recruit volunteers to help with it. Because there are so many things to do for successful outreach and our minds are pre-occupied with the event, it is easy to short-change our congregations in how we communicate to them about what is going on and what we need them to do.

Here is a flyer we created to remedy that situation

As a very practical example, at our church, with the Adult Sunday School Class we are hosting a Thanksgiving outreach dinner. I've been working on it for some time and for it to be successful, we need many in the class to be involved. Though they have known we are doing this for some time--we just got the final approval of the location last week. I needed to let the class know and to let them know what we needed them to do.

My first idea was to simply do a PowerPoint Slide and announce it, but I knew that wasn't enough. I reminded myself of what I constantly try to teach that those of us who work and plan ministry events must always remember that the people we want to involve haven't been working on it as we have; they haven't been thinking and praying about it for as long as we have. They can't read our minds.

People need a tangible, paper, printed reminder of what we are doing and what we want them to do. Once the print piece is produced, we can put it on our information table for those who might have missed the first announcement and remind people about it in subsequent weeks.

We have to clearly share our vision and requests

We have a lot going on, we want people to do a number of things. Though in the coming weeks I will have specific task lists and sign-up sheets I wanted to give people a flyer that specifically told them:

  • what was going on
  • basic information
  • our goals
  • prayer requests
  • what we needed them to do

The flyer illustrated here is what I came up with. The information is what is most important here and it was well-received.

It seems like we never have the time to put together things like this, but they are vitally important for as many people as possible to be involved in ministry events and outreach.

CLICK HERE to DOWNLOAD a PDF of the flyer.