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; we can help.
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Easter return bulletin insert converted to JPG for additional usefulness

16 March, 2009 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Easter Questions flyer in Jpg format
This image has been converted to a resizable jpg for you to be able to copy and use in your Easter communications.

This website exists to serve you and though I can't answer every request, when you need something in a format that would be useful to you in your ministry, send me an email and let me know.

A kind request from a church communicator was the inspiration for this project. The situation that she described to me was that her church did not allow the use of bulletin inserts and she wanted to know if she could have the file in a format where she could use it without having to recreate it.

In addition, since she had to put the entire piece into the bulletin with only one side showing of course she could not print the "back " material, the website listing there. I did not give the text for that in the other article about this insert. That oversight has been corrected and the text for the back of this insert with the websites listed is in an updated version of the complete article about this insert.

I worked on redoing the insert, sent it to her and it worked!

So I am sharing it with all of you. I will be doing more of these in the future in addition to the downloable PDFs I currently do......of course in the future, these will be for members primarily.

The image here is a jpg, resizeable graphic. Just click on it and when you go to the page with only it on it, copy it and paste it into whatever you want. Download the PDF to the right and it will illustrate the various ways you can use the image.

A PDF of the various ways you can modify and use this image.
A PDF of the various ways you can modify and use this image.use theimage.

You can resize it for a newsletter, handout or your bulletin.

Click on the image at the left to download it; click on the image on the right to download the sheet showing how you can crop and use it.

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Filed Under: Easter Tagged With: church bulletins, Communications, Easter, Easter bulletin insert, yvon prehn

The importance of involving Children in Easter outreach (don’t just entertain them)

7 March, 2009 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Strategy for Children's events at Easter might consist of simple publications, but these simple publications can have far-reaching results in how they bring people to your Easter church service and how many return on an ongoing basis. Many people today will come to a church they feel is good for their children. They might not personally be interested but they want something wholesome for their kids. As many churches know this is often a wonderful way to eventually get the entire family involved.

To start, children's invitations to Easter events can and should be very different from the ones you send out to your community and that you give to adults. Many churches have wonderful activities for children at this time of year and children are never too young to learn how to be inviters.

The invitations here offer tools to help them do that.

Both invitations are one-quarter page size and are ready to print PDFs. They would work well-printed on light-weight card stock. A heavy paper would also work well. Make up lots of them and give them out to the children in your church.

Along with giving out the invitations, this is a great time to teach children that church events are not just times to enjoy for themselves. Church events are opportunities to introduce their friends to the church and to Jesus.

Join us for Easter Fun InvitationWhen children invite their friends, when they see families come who have never been to church, when they see the people at your church welcome and enfold visitors and when they see their friends come to know Jesus—these experiences will teach them the joy of evangelism in a practical, experiential way.

No matter how wonderful your children's program for Easter, you don't want people to experience one Sunday and never come back.

You need to give them something as they leave your church or children's program that lets them know what else you have going on and invites them to return. No matter how impressed they were or how much the like you, you need to give them the concrete details that will actually link them to your church events.

Bunny Return Invitation
A Bulletin insert or giveaway to remind people to come back to your children's program after Easter.

This ready-to-print PDF can be personalized on the back with information specific to your church. Please be sure to include your website and be sure that on it you have detailed information about your children's program and contact information if people need more information.

Intentional work will result in eternal life-changes

It is a lot of work to do all that needs to be done in your children's ministry at Easter, but taking the time to intentionally involve the children in inviting and to intentionally create complete follow-up materials will result in eternal life-changes for the people who respond to Jesus through your hard work.

In closing I want to emphasize how important it is that you involve the children of your church in the inviting process. It is so easy for kids to think that Easter is all about the goodies that they are going to get and it is so easy for parent's to expect the church to offer a good time for their children. That attitude misses the point of Easter. Please take the time to teach your children to give as Jesus gave and to take the time to invite their friends to Easter events at your church.

All of these are available in ready-to-print PDFs.

Below is the link to it.

Book Cover For Easter PDFs
This booklet has 40 pages of ready-to-print Easter communications. It is free for ECC MEMBERS.

To download the PDF collection (the kids stuff is near the end), click on the following link: #1 Easter 2010 PDFs COMPLETE

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Filed Under: Children's ministry, Easter Tagged With: Children's ministry, Communications, Easter, Easter bulletin insert, Easter for children, Easter invitation, yvon prehn

The importance of a COMPLETE gospel message at Christmas and always

18 December, 2008 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

In the past, when the culture, school system, and world view was Christian, when you talked about Jesus and accepting him as your personal Savior, most people knew what you were talking about. They may not have believed it, they may not have thought it applied to them, but part of their cultural worldview was a Biblical view of the historical Jesus. Again, they may not have accepted it personally but they knew the facts about who and what they were rejecting. It is very different today.

Now, when you mention Jesus, you need to be very complete and clear what Jesus you are talking about. Are you talking about:

  • A Jesus who is in every person, a sort of divine spark, which is what many new-age folks believe?
  • A Jesus who was a first century Jew and who did good works and taught ethical precepts, but was not the Messiah, as Jewish people believe?
  • A prophet, but not the prophet, as the Muslims believe?
  • Or are you talking about the eternally existing second person of the Trinity, who came to earth, died, was buried, physically rose from the dead, and who is coming again, which is what evangelical Christians believe?

This is just the start of what you need to completely communicate about Jesus: his life, substitutionary death, his physical resurrection, his intercession for us today, his coming return. All of these truths are not part of most people’s current world view. You cannot assume that people have any knowledge of them when they come to your church. You can’t ask them to commit to a savior if they don’t even know who he really is.

A practical example of the dangers of incomplete communication about Jesus

Imagine it is Christmas and your church hosts a Christmas concert: wonderful organ music, uplifting choir pieces, moving poetry, and Bible passages all as background to a moving Christmas pageant. In the beautifully designed program (that the church communicator worked for hours to create and that cost a small fortune to print), is the statement:

If you have not accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, we trust that the joy of the music and message will so fill your heart that you will accept the true peace and joy of Christmas and become a Christian.

I do not want to be cynical, the Spirit can move in any way he desires, but if a person would then check on a card that he or she responded to this message, what does that mean? Does that person have any idea of the complete gospel message? Of the Jesus of history and not just the Jesus of beautiful hymns? Of cross-bearing and the crucifixion of Jesus and not simply Jesus the tiny baby in a manger? You may feel that you shared the gospel, that you challenged people to become Christians, but if someone responded to this incomplete gospel presentation, what really happened?

The early church required that potential converts go through a lengthy teaching time of many weeks and in-depth instruction before they were allowed to publicly proclaim their faith and be baptized. If we are not careful to completely proclaim the Christian gospel and completely teach people what a response to that gospel involves, we may be responsible for souls who think they have become a Christians but who are tragically, completely wrong.

Beyond the details of events and the essentials of salvation

The need to be complete goes beyond being certain we have all the details of events in place, though this is very important if we want to connect people with life-changing events. Being complete also moves beyond being certain people understand what it means to become a Christian, though that is the essential starting point.

We must also be complete in preparing our people to defend the faith. If we don’t take the time to completely explain, defend, and teach in depth about our faith, our people will be unprepared for those who oppose the Christian message, but who take time and care to completely put forth their false teachings. Though this component of effective church communications is most emphasized in Step 4, INSTRUCT; we must keep it in mind in every step of our communication ministry.

The challenge of those who do not believe the biblical, Christian message are sometimes more complete in their communications than we are.

The enemies of our faith are complete in their attacks. For example, a New York Times best-seller, Misquoting Jesus, the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman, has been weakening and  destroying the faith of many for years. Ehrman, who claims to have been a believer at one point in his life, drones on and on and on for 218 pages, in complete (though often distorted) detail, about why we cannot trust the Bible. His book is not difficult to refute, as his logic is faulty, his conclusions dubious, his seemingly shocking statements about supposed biblical inconsistences hardly news to any reputable biblical scholar. In addition, for any so-called scholarly author to use himself and his books, again and again as a primary citation of the truth of his facts, as Erhman does, is ludicrous.

But he is complete in a rambling, false, repetitive way and for a casual reader the simple volume of his argument is persuasive. I am not recommending his method, but it is effective.

Why his volume of distortions convince people

We somehow assume that if an author or authority takes the time to expound on a topic in detail and depth that it is important. Conversely, if we aren’t told about or taught about an important topic in depth it is easy to assume it is not very important. Consider the above two examples:

1. A Christmas gospel presentation of one paragraph.

2. A lengthy book detailing why the Bible can’t be trusted.

Based on the sheer volume, number of citations, seeming care and time taken to explain each topic, it would seem that author of  the book about the Bible took his topic much more seriously, that he obviously cared enough to research and write about it in more detail.  An uniformed seeker might consider it more true because of its completeness.

In contrast, a challenge to consider an eternity-changing decision presented in one brief, emotional paragraph, doesn’t have the same apparent importance. You may protest that a Christmas program is not the place to do into a lengthy, apologetic discussion of the Christian faith and that’s true. However, the lack of space in the program does not mean we should not explain the plan of salvation in its completeness.

Here is where the communication tools we have today and the ability to do multi-channel communication can be useful. We don’t have to put the complete details about salvation in the Christmas program. Keeping in mind the multi-channel resources we have,  in the Christmas program, could be a short statement like this:

Becoming a Christ-follower is a decision that will change your eternity and the way you live the rest of your life on earth.

Don’t make the decision lightly. To explore what it means to be a Christian, please check out our website at www.churchwebsite.com.

There you’ll find answers to questions, links to explore the faith, and email addresses of folks waiting to interact with you. Not wanting to go there?  Call 555-5555 and there will be someone to talk to.

We need to take time to be certain the messages of our church and the gospel are presented in completeness. Yes, setting up a complete web links, finding and training people to interact through email and the phone is difficult and time-consuming. But, if the enemies of truth can take the time to do this, we can do no less. Even if you can’t go into this much detail, at least including a well-done tract would be useful, but without anything more than a brief mention to consider Jesus, it’s hard to take the challenge to consider Jesus as Savior and Lord seriously.

One more note: An in-depth, complete critique and series of articles showing the falseness of Bart Erhman’s thesis is available on www.equip.org, the Bible Answerman’s website. In addition, one of the most complete apologists of the Christian faith is Lee Strobel and his book, the Case for the Real Jesus,  deals with Erhman’s and other current critics of the Bible and Jesus and provides in-depth answers to their false claims. I highly recommend both sources and have used them prior to Christmas to do a series of lessons on Why Jesus is the Reason for the Christmas Season.

_____________________

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Filed Under: Christmas Tagged With: Communications, evangelism, outreach communications, yvon prehn

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Link to Easter Templates of all sorts

Seasonal Templates

  • OVERVIEW of TEMPLATES for Church Communicators, please read first
  • Valentine’s Day Templates
  • Lenten Templates
  • Easter Templates
  • Mother’s Day Templates
  • Father’s Day and Men’s Ministry Templates
  • Graduation Templates
  • Summer-related Templates
  • 4th of July, Canada Day, and GRACE for All Nations
  • See You At the Pole
  • Harvest Festival and Halloween Templates
  • Christmas Templates

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FREE Bible Verses and Sayings in both print and social media format at Bible805Images.com
FREE Bible Verses and Sayings in both print and social media format at Bible805Images.com
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