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.

Reminder of Christmas links and personal update on the California fires

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Please know you are being prayed for in the final days of preparation for all you have to do for your Christmas services. I'm sure you are exhausted and stressed, but I pray that in your heart you'll know the peace that comes from serving our Prince of Peace. I wanted to take a few minutes to remind you of the resources available to you from Effective Church Communications and then a personal update about the fire situation.

Christmas Resources: ECC has Templates for every aspect of Christmas, CLICK HERE to go to them. At the top of page are some FREE ones that you can use to share the gospel message this Christmas. [Read more...]

PLEASE READ!!!! BIG revision to Effective Church Communications coming soon; site will be down for a time

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I love books, but who can find anything in a place like this? I fear this website is in a similar state and drastic measures are called for, so I'll close down for a time to tidy.

Do you have a closet that started out organized and useful and filled with wonderful things, but then after you added this or that or put in one more thing you couldn't bear to part with your lovely closet, seemingly overnight turned into unmanageable chaos where you can't find a thing?

That's how I feel this website has become. Lots of good and useful stuff here, but what a mess.

I can't find things and I wrote them all.

For the last few months in the background I've been trying to reorganize things as we go into the important holiday season. In addition, I've been working on the new Training part of the website and trying to figure out how to integrate that and it's like trying to fit in five more pairs of shoes into that already overflowing closet. Not working well at all.

Drastic measures are needed.

I've spent lots of time praying and planning; researching and experimenting and I think I've come up with a solution. In summary, I'm going to reorganize the site into four areas:

  • Strategy
  • Templates
  • Training
  • Resources

I could go into reams of details for how and why, but I'd rather just wait and show you.

But to do this, I have to take the site off-line for a couple of weeks.

I tried to not do that, but though I'm pretty techie, mocking up a site just doesn't work for me (and I've wasted weeks trying).

We are in-between major holidays and I'll have the site up with lots of new things for Christmas in plenty of time so as of Tuesday, Halloween, Oct. 31, I'll be taking the site off-line.

Please pray LOTS for me for wisdom and that I follow the Lord's will in all. Many of you have prayed for me over the years for the many changes and I believe this is one of the most important ones. In many ways I want to greatly simplify the organization of the material and make it more accessible to church communicators of all levels all over the world.

This is scary. But the Lord knows what He wants me to do to obey His voice and serve His people. Please pray I hear and obey.

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One more thing: I may be giving updates on the ECC Facebook page.

No promises, but I know I do need to be better on posting on it and while the site itself is down, this would probably be a good time to try.

 

 

More than prayers, an idea to help hurricane victims

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Help church communicators.
No matter where you are you can reach out and help church communicators, here's how.

I know all of us are praying for the victims of the hurricanes and I know we will continue to do that through the long recovery process. In addition to that, I recently remembered a very practical idea church communicators did after Katrina.

They helped do the church communications for churches who had lost their offices or the ability to create communications.

A church at a remote location would create the bulletin, flyer, newsletter, postcard, whatever was needed and then would send it to wherever the church wanted it printed.

This plan was organized in a number of ways, either informally through social media or in a more structured way through their denominations.

If you have other ideas or are trying  this, let us know through the comment section here.

But most of all continue to pray.

Corrected Civility Code available for you….my bad

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In a very courteous email (really, the writer was so kind) an ECC Member emailed me to let me know I'd left a word out of the Civility Code I shared. It is in the last line, I left out the word "to" in the phrase, "to walk worthy."

I truly do appreciate it when someone catches my mistakes.

I corrected the sheet and the zip file containing the new one is available by clicking here: Civility Code

Thank you again Diane, and may we all truly "walk worthy" as we serve our Lord in Church Communications.

Church Communication Teams, how to successfully combine staff and volunteers

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Work Effectively as a Church Communication Team
This article will help you work effective with your church communication team of staff and volunteers. CLICK on the image to download it.

How do you work together as a communication team when it is a combination of staff and volunteers who work from a variety of locations? I recently did an article for Ministry Tech Magazine where I summarized many useful insights on this that I've collected over the years. They liked it so much, they made it their featured story for this issue.

I LOVE how they lay out the stories and since they distribute them in free PDF format, I'd like to pass on the article to you.

I'm doing this so you can print it out and share it with your staff and volunteers. You might first want to talk about it with your staff and come up with guidelines based on it.

We all have more than we have time to do in communicating the messages of the Kingdom of God, but putting together a team with clear guidelines and procedures, not only makes it easier for each member, but more people get to hear about Jesus and grow and mature as disciples.

Click HERE or on the image to download the PDF.