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.

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...]

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...]

ebook: Back to Basics, writing and design skills for church communicators

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Back to basics cover
This book will teach you the basics of many needed, but often not taught, communication skills in graphics, design, typography, writing, and managing. If you want your church communications to look more professional, you need this book. Available in print and ebook formats.

Most people who work on communication creation in churches have no training in design, layout, typography, and many related skills they need to do a good job. Training material is not easy to find because many of the materials available on communication design and related areas, require the use of expensive, advanced software and teach a secular, image-heavy approach that doesn't always fit the needs of the church audience.

This book provides basic training that can help every church communicator, even those with no previous graphic arts training create, write for, and manage a church communication ministry. This book is not a how-to on a particular software, but about the basic design and communication principles that form the foundation of effective communication creation.

This book is a scanned reprint of Yvon Prehn's earlier book, How to use your computer to create Better Bulletins, Newsletters, and More! All the examples in the book are from church communications and the advice is practical and Bible-inspired.

To be honest, the quality of the scans in the book isn't the greatest, but I felt the content was worth it to make this book available to you.

To buy a paperback version of the book on Amazon.com, CLICK HERE.

If you'd like the book in e-book, PDF format CLICK HERE

Free ebook on Basic English Grammar and a helpful website for writing advice

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This book is a free ebook on the site link below. It is a helpful review for what we all learned a long time ago.

We could all do better on our writing, grammar, and editorial skills and this website has a wealth of articles to help. In addition, they also have a very useful FREE Ebook on the Basics of English grammar. They send out a daily newsletter with short writing tips that I don't always read, but have found useful.

They also have a number of blog articles they link to that are excellent reminders and training to help us keep quality in our church communications.

Be a bit careful of the advertisements on their site. For example, I didn't like the big display ad on self-publishing "for only $100." You can self-publish books for free, you don' t need to pay someone to do it for you. That's one of the reasons we do self publishing. But overall, lots of useful material.

CLICK HERE to go to the site overall

CLICK HERE to go to the page to download the FREE Basic English Grammar ebook.