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.
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Follow the example of the Apostle Paul—make Halloween a great time for Evangelism and FREE materials to help you do that!

19 September, 2025 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Or how to use everything that is bad about Halloween as a tool to share the gospel—

If there is a holiday that causes controversy in the church, it is Halloween. Some churches welcome it as a great time to do community outreach with alternative Halloween events; others shake their fingers and condemn churches that even mention the term.

It’s always easier to curse the darkness than to flood it with light, but taking our cue from the Apostle Paul who used the pagan idols in Athens as his bridge to sharing the gospel, I'd like to challenge you to use this time of year to share the gospel.

Following is a brief video of the material that follows and after it the text of it and at the end of the blog, FREE Downloadable materials for you to use in your Halloween outreach. Please make the most of them and don't miss this opportunity!

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Fall Festival and Halloween, Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: free Halloween materials, Halloween alternative events for churches, Halloween outreach, share the Gospel at Halloween

FREE HANDOUTS for Halloween evangelism and the true Christian view of life after death

17 September, 2025 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Ghosts aren't real but Jesus is --Resources for Fall and Halloween church outreach
Halloween can be a great time for evangelism and a small handout like this can make a lasting impact at your celebrations.

UPDATED intro: If you only do ONE thing to reach out to people at Halloween and at your alternative events with the Gospel Message—do THIS—make one of these communications to hand out in Goodie bags or as people leave. To make the most of our time and to share the true message of what happens after death, this is a way to do it.  First is a preview of the materials you can download, and for more motivation, check out the materials that follow it....

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Fall Festival and Halloween, FREE Materials Tagged With: evangelism for Halloween, Fall Festival or Halloween does it matter what we call it, Halloween at church, life after death and Halloween

Social media images for Easter with challenging messages

3 January, 2025 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Easter message--and free Instagram images
Though a little more wordy than some Instagram images, this challenges people to think about why Jesus is the reason for the Easter season.

Because so many people think that Easter is only about bunnies and brunch we need to share with our invitations and in all our communications about Easter that it is about so much more!

This is a continuation of the topic discussed in Why just "Come to Easter at Our Church" isn't enough--FREE invitations with short, but powerful messages

Because so many people think that Easter is only about bunnies and brunch we need to share with our invitations and in all our communications about Easter that it is about so much more!

These social media images (the zip file has images sized for Instagram) will help you do that. They are free for you to download, share, and use in any way you'd like. The ZIP file is below the images. Click on the first image and they will enlarge for you to read the text more clearly. You can read them fine on your phone.

CLICK HERE to download the ZIP FILE with the images: Easter Social Media Images

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Filed Under: Easter Tagged With: easter social media, Free images for Easter outreach, Instagram for Easter

From our vault: Everything you need for Easter: Templates, strategy, inspiration and encouragement for all your Easter communications

3 January, 2025 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Easter Invitation
This is one of the Easter Invitation Templates. You can link to dozens more from this article.

Effective Church Communications has dozens of Resources, including articles, podcasts, and FREE Templates you can use for all the Easter communications you need for before, during, and after Easter.

These are from our Template and Podcast vaults--we will be creating new ones but many of these designs and the strategy linked to them are timeless.

The FREE templates have all the work of communications done for you: the design, layout, choice of type, and copyright-free artwork is all done saving you many hours. The Templates are in both ready-to-print PDF format (which you can personalize on the back) and easy-to-modify, MS Publisher files. Please let others know about these resources. Following are links to all of them: [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Easter Tagged With: church communications for Easter, Free Easter resources, List of FREE EASTER RESOURCES, Templates for Easter

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

2 January, 2025 By Yvon Prehn 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.

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Filed Under: Church Outreach and Marketing, Easter Tagged With: Easter invitations, print your own Easter invitations, printable Easter invitations, unique Easter invitations

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Recent Posts

  • Follow the example of the Apostle Paul—make Halloween a great time for Evangelism and FREE materials to help you do that!
  • FREE HANDOUTS for Halloween evangelism and the true Christian view of life after death
  • Social media images for Easter with challenging messages
  • From our vault: Everything you need for Easter: Templates, strategy, inspiration and encouragement for all your Easter communications
  • Why just “Come to Easter at Our Church” isn’t enough–FREE invitations with short, but powerful messages

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