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.
Family members who don't come any other time of year may visit your church for Mother's Day. Here is a bulletin insert or flyer you can use to encourage your congregation to pray for them.
Flowers and candy are nice, but for many Mothers the desire of their heart is that those family members, spouses and children who don't know Jesus would come to Him. Mother's Day is a fantastic opportunity to reach out to these loved ones and the bulletin insert/flyer/or text however you want to use it is a way to involve your church in praying for them.
Below are images of the flyers and below them is a link to a ZIP file that has PDFs of them that are ready to print and use, editable MS Publisher files, and jpeg images for you to use to share in publications encouraging your congregation to pray.
Below is the text from the handouts for you to use in any way you want, no attribution or credit required:
Our church has an opportunity to pray with Mothers in preparation for Mother’s Day because out of all the Sundays of the year, this is the one Sunday unchurched children and spouses may come to church to make Mom happy.
So below is a place for you to list the names of people the Mothers you know would like you to pray for. Ask for prayer requests and remember to not only ask biological Mothers, but the many spiritual Mothers in our church, who may have spiritual children in their lives that are precious to them and who they want to come to know Jesus.
In addition to praying for the guests who come, pray for our church body to put our prayers into practice by focusing on our unchurched guests on
Mother’s Day. Pray we will all be welcoming, that the sermon will touch hearts, that we will provide materials for unchurched spouses, children, and friends to explore the Christian faith.
And most of all pray that this Mother’s Day will be one that will bring the greatest joy imaginable to a Mother—the knowledge that those she loves will spend forever with her and Jesus.
For even more motivation to make the most of Mother's Day, please check out this video
This video can totally change how your church celebrates Mother's Day and can make it into a time of significant outreach.
Click on the image to go to the video and notes on the Church Communications Training School. Please take time to watch it with your staff and discuss it—it can totally change how you approach Mother's Day. If you are a member of the Church Com Training School you have permission to show this video and make copies of handouts to the staff or any church communicators group you are part of without the rest of them having to be members.
Would you invite people to a birthday party for someone they didn't know? Of course not--but that's what we do when we invite people who don't know Jesus to celebrations about him.
Would you invite people on the street to a graduation party for someone they don't know?
Would you ask strangers to celebrate the promotion of a person they never met?
Would it make sense at all to send out an impersonal bulk mailing for people to attend a wedding?
Of course, you won't do any of these things. You've all been raised better than that. You don't invite someone to an event that means nothing to them, attended by people they don't know when you don't know the person you are asking.
If that's true in our day-to-day lives, why is it we do that as a church for Easter or other special events?
Think about it. I'm asking because, after spending some time looking at current online advertisements created for churches to send to strangers for Easter, I realized that many of them would only make sense to Christians. Then I realized that outside of the brunch, many of the things that church people at the Easter service are only meaningful to the people at the church. [Read more...]
Use a card like this if you want people to return to your church after special events.
When your church hosts special events this should be the start of a relationship, not simply a one-time visit. But to make that happen you need to get your visitor's contact information. Following is a process you can use to get that information, samples of communications that will do it and follow-up cards after the events. There is a generic one and also examples for fall outreach and one for Christmas.
The big question is—how to make that happen?
One of the best ways we've found to do that is to have a drawing for a special prize related to your event and ask people to register for it. You can be very upfront that you will be using the information to contact them and that, if at any time they want to be removed from your mailing list, it isn't a problem. You don't want to hide your purpose and most people don't mind when you let them know the details upfront. [Read more...]
The following set of Templates was inspired by the article by Gayle Hilligoss and the postcards she created for Valentine's Day outreach for her church. The ones I created prior to seeing her wonderful creations filled the entire front of the card and assumed you would personalize them on the back. I loved her idea of having all the information on the front (much easier to print, etc.) and so I created some templates for you to modify and use in your church.
You could use these as postcards or hand-out invitations. The church office can print them and then put in 5 in each bulletin on Sunday. From the pulpit encourage the congregation to pray and send or hand them out. If you have a special Valentine's Day event (dessert buffet of chocolate is what we did one year, it was a big hit), give the details of that on the back.
Below are images of the cards and below them is the ZIP File to download and modify for your churches.
This FREE Christmas Template can be used either as a postcard to invite people to your Christmas services or as a cover for your Christmas programs.
For those of you who aren't familiar with our TEMPLATES I put together a selection of Christmas Templates from different communication pieces, but that can be printed on the same size of paper ( 8 1/2 x 11) to demonstrate how easy it is to use them and modify them.
Just like in our Template section, below are pictures of what is included. Below that is a ZIP file of designs in both PDF and MS Publisher format and below that is a brief video that shows you what to do with them.
A selection of Christmas TEMPLATES
Though we have many more communication pieces that aren't represented here (invitation cards, connection cards, follow-up postcards, etc.) these will help your church share the message of salvation in Jesus this Christmas season. You have my permission to pass them on to any church or group you'd like.
Each sample type illustrated has a variety of additional designs in our TEMPLATE section.
To download this selection of Templates in both PDF and editable MS Publisher formats click the following link: CHRISTMAS TEMPLATE SAMPLE SET
Video preview and briefly how to edit the Templates
