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.

Why words are more important than images in church communications

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Words are the primary carriers of meaning in our church communications.
Words, not images, are what clarify meaning in our church communications.

No matter what tools we use to create our message; no matter what channels we use to share it, the one thing that never changes is our core content. Our content, permeated with the truth of the entire Bible and culminating with a call to salvation and discipleship in Jesus, must be the anchor of every communication piece we produce.

The obvious question then is: what is the best way to communicate our content?

Here is one of the greatest errors, challenges, controversies, problems—it's hard to pick just one word—confronting church communicators today and that is the mistaken priority use of images over carefully crafted words to communicate our content. It doesn't matter what technology channel we use, the issues of the communication value of words vs. images is the same.

Words are the primary carriers of content, of clear propositional truth. Words however, are difficult to wrangle into meaning. It takes work, thought, planning, and editing to even approximate clear communication. [Read more...]

Pastor Laurence Edgar from Belfast shares his experiences publishing with Kindle

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Pastor Laurence Edgar from Belfast
Pastor Laurence Edgar from Belfast shares his experiences publishing with Kindle

One of the things I love about this site is when those of you reading it share your experiences in church communications. Recently I received an email from Pastor Laurence Edgar from Belfast sharing his experiences on creating books for Kindle. I got his permission to share them with you and they are shared below, lightly edited for space.

One of the most important things about this is the encouragement that if you have a message you feel the Lord wants you to share, you can do it. You never know who will come across your material once you put it out there. Here is what Pastor Laurence had to say about it:

An Opportunity for All

by Pastor Laurence Edgar

Here is an opportunity for everyone who can write—converting your books to Kindle. Fiction, Novels, Series, Religion, Write articles, Food Recipes, Music, Exercise, Keep Fit, Sports, Healthy Eating. Write just about anything. It could turn out to be an extra source of income for them or their church.

I myself always liked writing tracts, and Bible Verses. I began to write small booklets
several years back. I tried to sell them as downloads through a web site which I designed,
without success, no one ever downloaded them.

Then I read about Kindle and I decided to take up the challenge. I edited my books into Kindle format, simple PDF format. I designed a Book cover, which wasn’t really that difficult. Nothing difficult about the whole process.

Here is how I did it: [Read more...]

Communication creation tips for reaching time-stressed and time-starved audiences

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Remember time stress when creating church communications
Remember the time stress of your audience when creating church communications.

Need some evidence that it isn't just your imagination making you feel stressed out? An article in the Wall Street Journal concluded: ". . . .at the end of the weekend, you are more than a full day behind in your activities. Even if we went to an eight-day week you still would be 4.5 hours behind."

Ed note before I continue: I wrote this article several years ago and while updating the website ran across it. The time challenges of your audience today make it worth another look because though a few years have passed if anything the situation of time demands has become even more challenging as we attempt to reach people. Following is a reprint of the article with a number of updates added.

An article in the Wall Street Journal reported Americans work an average of 53 hours a week. Dale McFeatters took that statistic and calculated that if an individual did all the activities reported such as sleeping, TV, dressing, etc., without multitasking, that person would have a 28.5 hour a week time deficit. In addition to helping explain why we often feel stressed and tired,his calculations help explain why it is so difficult to get people respond to the communications from your church. Following are some ideas on how to communicate your church's message to a time-stressed and time-starved audience. [Read more...]

A very FREE, FUN, EASY, and Creative tool for Halloween graphics

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This is SO much fun! It is a short presentation of a free and very easy and fun program you can use to create and modify Halloween communications. So many things I've talked about Halloween outreach are rather heavy and intense--this is purely a fun thing--a way to modify any image with Halloween images.


 
CLICK HERE TO go to LINKS to motivation and tools to help you share the good news about Jesus at Halloween

Why words and images need each other–the feedback loop of meaning

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Captions define what we see, never publish a picture without them
This PDF illustrates the topic of this article-- how our words define the meaning of our images. Later in the article you can download it.

We've all heard the phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words"-- a phrase which I consider one of the most meaningless and destructive phrases to meaningful communication ever coined. That is because without words, the proper response to that statement is, "which thousand?"

I just posted a blog that discusses the importance of carefully crafted words in our church communication.

Here I want to answer the question: does that mean we can't use images?

Following the excerpt below from what's written in the blog, I want to illustrate what I mean by the feedback loop of meaning between images and words. [Read more...]