Challenges, commentary, and free templates to help churches create communications that help people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples.

In other words, to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

Effective Church Communications

Timeless training from Yvon Prehn to help churches create communications that will enable them to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

An alternate way to celebrate Mothers and Mother’s Day—Free Mother’s Day stationery

By Leave a Comment

FREE Mothers Day Stationery Templates
We may not be able to celebrate in person, but we can all write a letter to honor our Mothers this Mothers Day.

This year with the social distancing in place many churches are not able to celebrate Mother’s Day in traditional ways. For many churches that has meant doing special things for Mothers as part of the Sunday service.

We aren’t able to do that this year, but here is a fun thing you can do—Write them a letter!!!

Below are some templates for you to use to write letters to the moms.

You can use them in a number of ways:

  • You can write a letter to the Mother’s in your church and send them out with a copy of One Mother’s Prayers.
  • You can do up the letter in MS Publisher (the file has MS Publisher files) or you can print them out and hand-write a note.
  • Or you can print out the stationery, do up a letter in Word or whatever other word-processing software you have and copy this on to the stationery.
  • You can send PDFs to your congregation via email and encourage them to print them off and write a letter to their mothers.

Don’t forget spiritual mothers as well as physical ones!

There are many women in our lives who have nurtured us in our Christian lives—remember them also on Mother’s Day. It will mean more than you can imagine to them.

Below are images of the stationary. The ZIP file contains ready-to-print PDFs, MS Publisher files (you can’t edit the images or text, but you could write your letter in that), and jpegs of each for you to use however you want.

Click the following link to download the files: Mother's Day Stationery

 

Modifications for Mother’s Day this year, a FREE ebook to challenge your thinking, and links to the timeless One Mother’s Prayers

By Leave a Comment

Sad plate
We may not be able to celebrate Mother's Day the way we have in the past, but here are some free resources that may be helpful.

This year we have many challenges with new ways to celebrate special events in our churches.

Yes, it is a challenge and can be difficult, but it's also a great time to stop and think about what makes a holiday truly special, and what are some timeless ways we can celebrate it?

We can evaluate what we've always done because it's a tradition and ask ourselves what do we do that is truly meaningful and honors the Lord and His people as we celebrate?

Mother's Day might be one of the most challenging times of all because it is when we tangibly and in very public ways celebrate the moms in our churches. It can also be a painful time for women who aren't mothers as they silently smile at the service and cry later alone at home.

Past challenges to expand your thinking on Mother's Day

I've often reminded churches that the reason Mother's Day Sunday gets the biggest attendance of the year just behind Christmas and Easter is not because of the moms who are there. They are there every Sunday. It gets the big attendance it does because on that Sunday the unchurched kids and spouses who don't normally come to church will come to make mom happy. Continue Reading

One Mother’s Prayer, a new set of PDFs to share for Mother’s Day and anytime for prayer groups

By Leave a Comment

One Mothers Prayer--a true story of the power of Prayer
Prayer is the most powerful gift we can give those we love. Read this true story and be encouraged in your prayers.

This true story has been one of the popular pieces on this site because it is an encouraging reminder of the power of a Mother's Prayers.

Whether someone is a mom biologically or spiritually, our prayers are the most powerful gifts we can give to those we love.

As this true story shows, prayer can totally change the direction of a life and turn someone who may have been openly hostile to the Christian faith into a powerful witness for Jesus.

Below are some new images of it I created recently in Canva. The ZIP file is of ready-to-print PDFs and jpg images.

If you want some of the older images, editable files, and the text file of One Mother's Prayer, go to: One Mother's Prayer, a free and inspiring story for however you want to use it for Mother's Day

To download the ZIP file of the ready-to-print PDFs and jpg images, click the following link: One Mothers Prayers 2020

 

 

One Mother’s Prayer, a free and inspiring story for however you want to use it for Mother’s Day

By Leave a Comment

One Mother's Prayer
This piece a perfect handout for Mother's Day or any time you want encourage people to pray for children.

This short piece, One Mother's Prayer, is a true story that is both an encouragement to pray for children and an assurance of the power of prayer to change a destiny.

It has been published more times than anything else I've written. It was first published in Today's Christian Woman magazine. Then in their Best of Ten Years of writings, it has been reprinted and republished all over the world, and it continues to bring tears to the eyes of any group I read it to. You are free to use it any way you want and share it however you want.

Below is a Free ZIP FILE of PDF formats: 2 more 8 1/2 by 11 plus 4 other versions on half sheet size plus the jpgs of the larger files and an MS Word text file if you want to create your own publication. The text file and the link to all the other downloads are after the images below if you want to use it in a newsletter or social media.

This is a great resource not only for Mother's Day, but any time of the year for Mom's groups and prayer groups.

Last year (2019) I also made a PODCAST recording of it. Here is the embed code if you want to put it on your website or any kind of social media:
<iframe src="https://anchor.fm/yvon-prehn/embed/episodes/SPECIAL-PODCAST-Yvon-Prehn-reading-One-Mothers-Prayer-e3usu0" height="102px" width="400px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">

You can listen to it here:

Full Page Size Print versions of One Mother's Prayer

One Mother's Prayer Full Page versions IMAGE 2 labre One Mother's Prayer Full Page versions IMAGE 3

Half-page size One Mothers Prayer (two additional ones on Members PDF that aren't shown here)

dolor One mother's prayer, contemporarysit amet, cOne mothers prayers, cute oneonsectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam"Lorem ipsum dolor sit

Text of One Mother's Prayer--

Her worst fears had come true. Her son had become involved in a strange mystical religion. She had such high hopes for him. Since his infancy she prayed God would touch his life. Her husband wasn’t a Christian and sometimes, in a temper, would taunt her praying, but she kept on.

Her son grew up in a small town. The family owed their home, but they weren’t wealthy. Determined their son would have a good education, they scrimped and saved to send him to school. Somehow his brother and sister didn’t receive the same attention or prayers.

He did extremely well in school. People began to notice his brilliant mind. A prominent citizen of the town set up a scholarship for her son’s graduate studies. She was so proud. Her joy diminished with worries about his spiritual health. He attended church some, but he refused baptism. And there were little incidents—stealing, things like that. She worried and she prayed.

He excelled in graduate school and finished with high expectations. But his religion . . . his letters contained long explanations of finding true reality and speculation how reality divided into darkness and light. Jesus was not truly God incarnate, he said, but an example of pure light entrapped and suffering in matter. He had always been good with words, but these words wounded her.

She decided to visit him. She thought her heart could stand no more pain, but she was wrong. He was living with a girl and they weren’t married. They had a son. She was a grandmother, but she couldn’t be proud of it.

In desperation she explained the situation to her minister. He told her that the son of so many tears could never come to destruction. Somehow the message seemed from God.

The years passed. Her son was unhappy with his job; he was often ill. He left the girl but kept the son. Finally he became disillusioned with his mystical religion and began to question her about God. He started to go to church again. There he found Christian friends and questioned them. He began to read the Bible.

Her prayers increased. Her husband died, but he had become a Christian in his final illness. She, too, grew weaker, older. She feared she would die before the prayers for her son were answered.

Her grandson was a teenager now and she went to visit. A changed son met her—a son hungry to know about God, asking questions, requesting prayer. A son who would one day rush to tell her he had given his life to God by trusting Jesus as his personal savior. At Easter her son and grandson were baptized.

Their times together now were so precious, talking about the Lord and praying together. Her prayers overflowed with thanks but still she desired much more for her son. She knew her son as a Christian less than a year. In the August after his Easter baptism she breathed her last and went home to the Savior, to whom she had spent so much of her life talking.

She never saw with earthly eyes the great man of God her son became. She never heard his great sermons or read writings that determined much of Christian theology. She never knew her son’s insights would jog Martin Luther into seeing that one is justified by faith alone. She would never hear her son’s words that caused so many hearts to consider Jesus as Savior:

“Thou hast made us for thyself, oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

Every part of this story is true—the mother who prayed was Monica, the mother of St. Augustine.

Download section:

CLICK HERE to download a ZIP file that contains:

* All of the One Mothers Prayer versions
*MS Word text file of the text for you to use in any way you want
* MS Publisher Original files (you must have MS Publisher to use this file)
* PDF Files
* Resizable jpg files

After you download the file, SAVE it to your computer, then click on it to "unzip" it and the files are ready for you to use.

—

Social

Why no paid advertising or affiliate links