Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.

Yvon Prehn's Church Communication Blog

The Bible tells us that “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, (Luke 6:45)” or as the J.B. Phillips translation puts it “For a man’s words will always express what has been treasured in his heart.”

My goal in these blog entries (actually in all of the ECC Ministry, but particularly here) is to give your heart and mind a biblical viewpoint and foundation in church communications, so that your communications, whatever form they take, will reflect God’s Word and not primarily secular marketing or current cultural views, fears, or attitudes.

I used the word “primarily” quite intentionally in the previous statement because though we learn from secular marketing and contemporary culture, these influences should not be primary in our work. The primary influence on our work is God’s Word. God’s Word informs the Effective Church Communication ministry in our goal, which is to help church communicators create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission.

Learning from, observing, and sharing other sources, while staying true to a biblical perspective and providing useful commentary is a challenging path to walk. No doubt I will often make mistakes, but to serve you in this way is my goal in these blogs.

Strategy for summer communications, remember visitors, delete hidden jargon, don’t host a money-divided event

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Summer Image
Your church will have visitors this summer, be sure your communications make sense to them.

LINK to FREE Summer Templates is at the end of this article

Looking ahead to planning summer communications, this summer your church will get lots of visitors, some of whom are friends of church members who might not regularly go to church, others may be from the surrounding community, and we can't forget out-of-town visitors. This is a wonderful opportunity to reach out with the gospel and the love of Jesus and here are some strategic tips to help your communications make the most of this opportunity and some strong cautions about what not to do.

Jargon watch

We know we shouldn’t use church jargon terms like justification and sanctification in our church bulletin, web, or social media when we are writing for people visiting our church, but so much of our church jargon we don’t even see. Using acronyms we don't explain, talking about events that we do year after year and assume everyone knows about, insider jokes, assuming people know times and locations—all these things are confusing and unkind to someone visiting. We don't want our language to keep someone with a free night in our city to miss out on an opportunity to learn about Jesus.

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For Graduates: Celebrate but also challenge

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Free Graduation Prayer
Graduation is a time for celebration, but don't miss out on it as a time to challenge your students.

Warning before reading: this is one of my more cranky blogs, but for what I hope is a good reason. I know that the following challenges to youth programs based primarily on fun and positive messages do not describe all youth programs, and please forgive me if your program takes equipping youth with Biblical values and a passion to serve Jesus seriously. However, in the lives of the teens close to me I see very little of this today. It makes me especially sad because I know it doesn't have to be like that. I was a youth leader for many years and even then I often doubted if I was doing the right thing because my program was not the most fun one around. It was filled with lots of Bible lessons, challenges, active service to the poor, mission awareness, and very high expectations. It was a large group, friends were invited, the church was pleased—all the outward measures of success were there—but I still wondered. The years have passed. My kids have gone on to become pastors, staff in Christian organizations, community and government leaders reflecting Biblical values, I pray their time in the not-always the most fun youth group contributed to that. So with another prayer that this cranky blog prove beneficial, I offer it to you. You have been warned. 

Celebrate, but also challenge your graduates

In preparing for this series of posts and resources on graduation (links at the end here), I searched Google to see what other churches were doing for graduation. Overall, the emphasis was on celebration, honoring the students, remembering all they've done, along with advice on making sure names were pronounced correctly. All fine and good, but for a generation of students who have grown up with constant reminders of how wonderful they are, but I think we do them a disservice by sending them off with one more "you are fantastic and the world loves you" message.

Though we want to take time to celebrate students and their accomplishments, we don't want to miss the opportunity to challenge them to a deeper commitment to their faith. This may be one of our last opportunities to do it.

Particularly for high school students, graduation is the start of serious spiritual challenges. Many churches rightly bemoan students drifting from their faith after high school, but if we've spent years telling them life is a big party and Christianity is lots of fun (or how else would we get them to come to youth group?), we shouldn't be surprised. [Read more...]

Don’t forget the people left behind in the rush to make all things digital

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Yvon's note: I admit, I was a bit cranky when I wrote this. Well, not so much cranky as sad, but I know I can come across cranky at times when I want to cry but end up yelling (ask my husband). I wanted to acknowledge that and ask for your forgiveness if the following comes across too harshly. I seem to be over-reacting a lot these days or maybe it’s an appropriate reaction to the over-the-top stresses of these days. I’m not sure, but I trust the following gives us thoughtful pause as we work to adapt to changing challenges while serving “the least of these.”

It’s been a wild ride in church communications and it isn’t going to smooth out any time soon as we try to figure out what to keep, what to modify, what new things to try, and what old ways of doing things we can toss out. Much well-deserved emphasis and discussion have been on new ways to conduct worship online and that will continue as churches work to figure out how to juggle the challenges of meeting physically together (while properly social distancing apart) and continuing an online ministry for those who cannot meet together.

While these discussions are going on, I’d like some recent thoughts.

Imagine you are older; imagine your health is compromised in some way and staying home is a necessity. Most likely this has been an extremely fearful time.

If you weren’t entirely comfortable with technology, it might have been a challenge to figure out how to participate in an online Bible study or watch a Sunday service.

Imagine that despite your fears, you are just now starting to feel comfortable taking communion with crackers and juice at home and singing along with the worship team on the computer. But on Sunday you are told this will stop. Well, maybe not stop entirely, the church will try to “stream” the service as they meet back in the building, but they are letting people know ahead of time this might not be the same and they made stop doing the online service. [Read more...]

Spam is spam if it is good for you or not, you need to tell people WHY a Bible study resource is good for them and HOW to use it, not just that it is available

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Church Notices as SPAM
Spam is spam whether you think it is good for your congregation or not. You must tell them WHY it is valuable and HOW to use any resource or it's simply spam.

How would you respond to messages like this:

Here are lots of vegetables—free vegetables—eat all you want!

The vegetables are here for the picking, be sure to take as many as you can carry.

These are vegetables kids really like! Help yourself!

Most likely your response wouldn't be overwhelming. You know how to get vegetables; maybe you even have a neighbor with a garden that gives you extras.

After a while, even the offer of free vegetables can be tiresome, and then it becomes an irritation.

Bible Study Resources are no different

Most people know they should study the Bible or read it, but simply badgering them about a free resource without telling them why they should use it or what they will get out of it, may not produce the response you want.

I'm writing this blog because of some feedback I got from an Effective Church Communication reader. Here is what she asked (and though I don't tell you enough, if you have questions or experiences like this, you can contact me at yvonprehn@gmail.com--I won't publish your name and I usually change some of the details, to not embarrass the efforts we all make--most questions I get apply to many of us, so I turn them into blogs like this and we all benefit). Here is the situation:

Yvon,
I don't know what to do. My church signed up for a service (without asking the congregation if they wanted or needed it) that produces hundreds of free videos on various Bible topics. Then they notified us of it. I went to the site and had to give my information to just look around.

It looked OK, but much of what was appealing was already available on YouTube or the websites of the various ministries.

I thought that was the end of it, but oh no. Then the emails started, recommending this or that. Today I got a postcard from them.

All of them just tell me what is available--lists of names, titles of videos. No more information about them and no reasons why I should care, other than they are good for me.

I don't have kids, but apparently a lot of people on the list do because I've gotten lots of recommendations for videos for kids.

I'm getting really irritated and feel bad about it.  If I tell them to take me off the list, will they tell my church and think I don't care about the Bible?

What should I do?

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What do your church communications say about the priorities of your church, especially in the summer?

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Summer communications
Because we have the opportunity to do different things in the summer, what we choose and communicate about reveals the true priorities of our church.

Jesus told us that "out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, (Luke 6:45)" and we know that's true. If we are angry with someone, it always comes out. Maybe in nasty, little snide comments, maybe in screaming. If we love someone, we can't help but smile when we are with them or thinking about them.

We may want to hide either emotion, but it seldom works. No matter what we say, "I'm not angry, just frustrated" or "No, he's really just a friend" our words and actions will always show what is in our hearts.

It's the same with your church. You can have the most biblical, Great Commission-centered mission statement ever. Your leadership board can decide that this year the focus will be on outreach and discipleship and the congregation can agree those are great goals.

But are these truly at the heart of your church? Do you honestly care about reaching unchurched people with the good news of Jesus and growing your current members into mature disciples? Do these convictions result in action?

It doesn't matter what you say in staff meetings. What does the voice of your church, your communications, say are your priorities?

This is very easy to evaluate. Look at the recent communications—your social media, newsletter, church bulletin. What are they about? As I write this, it's summer and I had the opportunity to compare two sets of church communications from two churches where they talk about their communications. The defining details are changed so as not to embarrass any member of the Body of Christ, but here is a summary of each one from an overview of their summer communications.

I selected summer as a time to evaluate because we tend to be very intentional about this time. Churches have incredible opportunities to either make a great impact for the Kingdom of God or to be selfishly inward-focused. The following are true stories.

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