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.

YOU CAN DO IT! all the church communications you need to do, in-house, using your people, and at low cost

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You can do it! All you need to in church communications.
You can do it! All you need to in church communications.

For your church communications, we've come a long way since the start of the digital revolution.  As we've progressed, more and more of the tasks of communication that were difficult have become easier with the development of resources that enable your church to create cost-effective and professional results, in all areas of church communications.

I've launched this website to help you;  I've got lots of resources designed to help you and more will be released on a continuing basis. I trust the information here will give you  inspiration and practical training, but overall, again, and again, outside whatever I can provide, my core message  is YOU CAN DO IT!

YOU, in your church, with your people can create all the communications you need to reach the people the Lord called you to reach and to grow your congregation to Christian maturity.

The Lord calls and gifts his people to do his work-you may not feel like, you may not want to, but no matter how quickly changing the technology, no matter how old or young you are, no matter where your church is located or how small your budget, you can do all the communications you need to win your community to Jesus and to help your people grow in their faith.

Following are expanded reasons why you can and should do your communications work in-house, in your church, by your church people.

Content is primary and should be personal

In your communication ministry periodically it's important to remind ourselves why we communicate anything at all in the church. We are doing it to fully fulfill the Great Commission given to us by Jesus to go into all the world, preach the gospel, and make disciples. It isn't the technology that we use that is of primary importance, but the content of our message.

Though the core message of every church, salvation in Jesus, is the same for every church, every church will express the gospel in its own unique way and no one can express it better to the audience your church is called to reach than the people in your church. [Read more...]

Multi-channel communication defined and why it is important

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Multi-channel communication means making the most of every opportunity you have to communicate the gospel message.

Unfortunately this is not something most church communicators want to hear. In this time of ever-changing options for communicating in our churches, it is easy to be overwhelmed and we naturally want to simplify our communication workload. This desire is expressed by the question, “What is the best way to communicate with people today? Is it the web, email, or podcasting? Do we still need to do print? What works best to reach the most people?

When overwhelmed with channel choices, it is natural to want to narrow it down to one or two that will be effective.

I always feel bad as I answer because I know people want me to give them a simple answer and to tell them that one channel, especially if it is the one they prefer, is all they need, but I can’t do that. I can’t do that because to be effective in your church communication ministry, to fully fulfill the Great Commission, there is no one way.

Today to be an effective church communicator, you have to use every channel available to you.

It is the time of both/and, not either /or

No one channel will work because people aren’t any more alike in their communication preferences than they are in other areas of likes and dislikes. Some folks love to go online; others don’t have a computer. Some love words; others prefer images and videos. Some love to listen to podcasts; others don’t have any idea what a podcast is. Some text continuously on their mobile phones; some won’t read anything that isn’t on paper.

It’s challenging because all of folks just mentioned go to your church. We can’t simply pick out one way to communicate because the Lord has put us into a body of wonderfully diverse people and it is our responsibility to create communications that are useful for all of them.

To make this situation manageable for practical application in church communications, I’ve divided the many communication channels into three overall groups. It is much more difficult to communicate in all three channels, but I trust this section will encourage you and give you some strategic ideas how to be more effective as you work.

The three channels of effective church communication

Channel #1: Print

This channel consists of printed bulletins, newsletters, postcards, invitation cards, connection cards, instruction materials, printed matter of all kinds, sizes, and quality that we create in the church. Print, in color, black and white, and all its forms, is still one of the primary and most important ways we communicate with people today and will be for some time. Almost everyone has access to this channel.

Channel #2: Digital

This channel is the latest tool we have to communicate the gospel message and we use it in PowerPoint® presentations, the internet, our website, email newsletters, cell phone and small screen communications, and anything else that makes up the newest, latest, and greatest communication technology. This channel is still emerging, developing in new systems and tools, and is expanding constantly. Not everyone has access to this channel and speed of adaptation varies tremendously with age and socioeconomic groups.

Channel #3: People

This communication channel is often easily forgotten, but it is probably the most important in any church communication program. You can have the most beautifully designed bulletin and the most complete and functional website imaginable, but if the folks at your welcome center ignore visitors and prefer to chat with each other, if the person answering the phone (assuming a real person can be reached) is having a really bad day and takes it out on all callers, or if the members of your congregation ignore visitors, the most beautiful and cutting edge communications, no matter if they are in print or digitally presented, will be useless. People are the church—the church throughout the ages is made up of people. Our people are always the primary message delivery tool of the gospel, accessible at all times to all people.

We are living in a time of great communication transition

We need to keep this transition time in mind as we consider the various channels of church communication. A few hundred years from now, things may settle down a bit and everyone will perhaps receive messages beamed wirelessly into their brain stem in a way that can be turned on and off with the blink of an eye, but right now we are in the midst of the biggest communication revolution in the history of humanity and this revolution floods us with communication options of every kind. In practical terms this means you need to learn and grow in all areas of communication.

That is what this site is about and to help you do that, here are some more resources that discuss multi-channel communication:

In your excitement over new communication channels please read: Never forget the people who don’t have access to the easily created channels

The Five Steps Strategy #1: Create multi-channel communication

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Multichannel communication is needed in churches
We live in a time of Multichannel communication--a time of both/and not either/or.

In this time of ever-changing options for communicating in our churches, it is easy to be overwhelmed and we naturally want to simplify our communication workload.  This is expressed by the question I get frequently  in my seminars and through email when people ask me, “What is the best way to communicate with people today? Is it the web, email, or podcasting?  Do we still need to do print? What works best to reach the most people?”

People may not realize when they ask, that they are asking for a ranking of communication channels including: print, online, web, small screen, and many more are the communication channels used to communicate today. When overwhelmed with channel choices, it is natural to want to narrow it down to one or two that will be effective.

I always feel bad as I answer because I know people want me to give them a simple answer and to tell them that one channel, especially if it is the one they prefer, is all they need, but I can’t do that. I can’t do that because to be effective in your church communication ministry, to fully fulfill the Great Commission, there is no one way.

[Read more...]

The Five Steps Strategy #3: Always be who you are, where you are

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God called you to a specific church, in a specific location, with a specific audience to reach for Jesus.  As part of creating communications specifically for your audience, don’t try to make your communications look like those from any other church and be cautious in the use of glossy, pre-done, nationally sold pieces. The same goes for fancy websites, the sort of expensive templates that all use beautiful, grinning people in the website headers.

Don’t be guilty of bait and switch where you send out some slick, fancy piece, or have an over-designed website if you’re a little church plant meeting in a basement. Big, glossy and professional is not always more appealing—many people are looking for a real, intimate, and honest interaction about God. They might miss you if you come across looking too slick and professional.

Keep in mind the parable of the talents

Jesus did not expect a person with one talent to do the work of the five talent person, but Jesus expected the one-talent person to make the most of what he or she had. If you are a tiny church with few resources, don’t feel you have to create publications or a website like the ones you saw at whatever big church conference the staff most recently attended. Be who YOU are, communicate to your people with the resources you have, and the Lord will bless your efforts.

Variety is standard in professional communication

The reason there are so many different types of professional designs is because there is no ONE perfect way to create any one communication piece. An excellent example of this is the variety in magazines. Go to your local Barnes and Noble or other big book store and look at the magazines. The design, style, and even the paper used, is very different for Architectural Digest than it is for Car and Driver. Both are professional, well-designed publications, but both serve a very different audience and their style reflects that audience, not some absolute standard.

For the editor of Car and Driver to think he’d be more professional, or cutting edge if he created an issue of his magazine in the same style as Architectural Digest would make about as much sense as it makes for the pastor of a small neighborhood church pastor of 300 in a farming community to attend a mega-church creativity conference in Dallas, come home and decide the church needs to create publications that look like the ones the mega-church in Dallas created. That is just goofy.

Why conference clones don’t make a successful church communications program back home in your church

Goofy or not, it happens all the time. In seminar after seminar people come up to me and ask what to do after their pastor comes home from the big conference with a stack of samples or the notes from some design or web seminar they attended (usually given by a staff member of the mega-church who has absolutely no concept of the resources and realities of smaller church communication ministry) and ask that the church secretary to figure out how to create stuff like this. The person asking me is usually the church secretary or communication person who is overwhelmed with their current work and has no idea how to implement what is now asked. In addition, that person often knows that the proposed cloning of communications:

  • requires a financial outlay in terms of software, images and reproduction systems that the smaller church most likely cannot afford,
  • will create materials that might have worked for the conference-sponsoring mega-church, but are not appropriate for their little local church,
  • requires the current communication person possess skills or software and a  budget they don’t have to create the desired results.

The sponsoring church of course has a way to solve the problem if you are not able to produce communications at your little church like the big host church—you can buy them! The mega-church offers templates, copies of their sermons, PowerPoints® slides, and graphics for sale on their website. To buy them is goofy multiplied.

For a little church, in a different state, with a completely different culture, to suddenly start handing out slick communication clones from a mega-church half a nation away will not automatically make you a big, impressive church. Visitors and spiritual seekers want authentic encounters with real people and purchased PR isn’t the way to do it.

Doing our best does not mean imitating someone else

We all want to do the best we can for our churches, but to imitate communications created by a completely different church in a different setting, with totally different resources and audience is not the way to do it.

It’s easy to forget that the big church currently admired, didn’t create the fancy stuff they do now when they were a little church. The fancy communications they do now are not what got them to where they are when they sponsor the conference.

I’ve seen this reality firsthand. As I mentioned in an another article, I got my inspiration for The Five Steps from a Shaddleback Church conference. One other thing I have from that conference is an 8 ½ x 11 manila envelope I purchased at their Resource Tent. It is filled with some black and white photocopies of examples of the communications they used to grow the church over twenty years ago when it was first starting. Needless to say, they are all very different than the pieces they use today.

What they used then was appropriate when they were a much smaller growing church; what they use today is appropriate for the mega-church in Southern California they are today. Don’t confuse what is appropriate for a church at a different time and place in their growth process with what is appropriate for you.