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.

Resurrection Cookies, a Free recipe that will teach children and parents about Easter, and it’s something you can do at home now

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Res Cookie Bunny Verstion
Resurrection Cookies are a wonderful way to remind both children and parents of the real meaning of Easter--the Resurrection of Jesus. Plus it's a fun and yummy project!

For a great strategy to teach children about Easter, involve parents, and provide an outreach tool, NOTHING beats Resurrection Cookies.

When you make the cookies, you visually illustrate Jesus suffering, burial, death and resurrection. Because you are doing it with cookies, it is much less intimidating for people who don't go to church to be involved with it.

In other years you can do this with friends and neighbors. This year with everyone staying home it is a wonderful activity for a family.

Below are pictures of a variety of designs for the Recipe. To see larger images of the pages, click on the first image and a larger slide show will come up. The file below them has both PDFs and MS Publisher files for you to download.

Various designs for Resurrection Cookies:

To download the Resurrection Cookie File, click the following link: Church Bunny Resurrection Cookie Files

Later in this article is the text for the handouts, including the introduction, recipe, and Bible verses if you choose to create your own verses of the handouts or if you want to put the material on your website or in a church newsletter. You have my permission to use it freely. The text is the same for all of them—choose a style that suits you best or use the text below to create your own version. [Read more...]

Effective WEBSITE strategy for Children’s Easter follow-up and a handout to go with it

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Children's Easter Return Card
CLICK on the image above to download the PDF. You can add specific information from your church on the back to help people return after Easter.

Many churches have special events at Easter for children. Many churches have an Easter Egg Hunt. One church in our city has a petting zoo every year. It's a fun event for kids and they serve snacks, play games, and get to interact with baby animals. Lots of unchurched people from the neighborhood surrounding the church attend.

The church doesn't do a petting zoo every Sunday. They don't serve special snacks each week to the kids and they don't have an Easter Egg Hunt each week. Also, the children's ministry doesn't even meet at the same time on a regular basis that they hold the special events for Easter.

Yet somehow, because of the petting zoo, and all the money and time spent on the goodies and the Easter Egg Hunt, the people in the children's ministry assume that the unchurched families in the area surrounding the church will come back to Sunday School the following Sunday because their kids had so much fun.

When they don't, the church staff is often disappointed, but they forget parents aren't mind readers. They have no idea what this church or any church does on a regular basis and no hint of why they should bother to get out of bed early Sunday morning to take their kids to some program they know nothing about.

A flyer like the one here is essential to give out at Easter. On the back you can invite families to your regularly scheduled children's ministry events. In addition to that, a clear link to your website can make a huge difference in ongoing response. Following are some ideas how this works.

How your website can help change this response

If you are a parent of young children, when you see an advertisement for a program for kids, a new game, a special food, anything advertised for kids, what is the first thing you do to check it out?

You will check out the website. On any commercial product or program of any kind, the website is always prominently displayed. That is the next step to find out about the product.

On the site it explains and illustrates the benefits of the product. It will answer questions, tell you where to get the product, and give you instructions on how to contact someone for more information if you have questions.

If this is the obvious that any commercial business does; why do we assume in the church that people will know all about what we offer kids on a weekly basis if we don't tell them? [Read more...]

FREE Easter Jelly Bean Prayer for Children’s Ministry

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Jelly bean prayer

By using the colors of Jelly Beans, this prayer is a visual way to share the gospel message to children—and to the adults with the children—sometimes candy isn't nearly as intimidating as a sermon.

It is useful at Easter to enclose in goodie bags, to use as an invitation, use as an illustration during a lesson or children's sermon.

The one to the right is an easy download for everyone, just CLICK HERE or on the image to download a ready-to-print PDF of it. Additional designs are illustrated below.

Additional Jelly Bean Prayer Designs

To see the images larger, click on the first one and a slide show will come up.

To download the Jelly Bean Prayer file, click the following link: Jelly Bean Prayer

At the end of this article is the text for the Jelly Bean Prayer that you can use to create materials for Easter for Children. [Read more...]

My personal motivation for Backpack ministry—my memories and prayers about crayons and little kids in need

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Contribute to back to school ministries.
Few things were more exciting to me as a child than a new box of crayons--and we have opportunities to share that joy with needy kids.

Remember the smell when you opened a new box of crayons? Waxy and warm with a bit of paper mixed in.

Remember what it was like to see all those new crayons? Sometimes there were new colors. The metallic crayons seemed magical. I almost hated to use them, to turn the neat, sharp points into smushy stubs.  But there was always another year to look forward to, another start of school and a new box of crayons.

Crayons were just the start—pencils, notebooks with lines unfilled, sometimes a new lunch box.  Back-to-school was my favorite time of year. I hated summer. I didn't particularly like to play kid's games, especially outside. I wanted to be left alone to read.

We moved every year (my father was in the military and that's what they did then) and the first place I would try to find in any house was some quiet corner to read. My very favorite was at the end of a long closet where there was a window. In front of it were some packing boxes just big enough and at just the right height for an 11-year-old girl to with a book and read and look out the window. Clothes were in front of the boxes, effectively shielding me from the outside world. Still, my mother would find me and make me go out and play. I was obedient, but I didn't like it. [Read more...]

Communications that will get people to come back to church after Easter, why, how to do them, and examples of effective ones

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Note: this is from our archives and many of the publications have updated versions in the TEMPLATES section. However, the overall theory here is an important summary for why you need to do all the things you need to do to get people involved in your church following Easter and I thought it would be useful for you to go through. The PDF download at the end has all the publications pictured.

In most churches their biggest turnout of the year is for Easter Sunday. This doesn't happen by accident-churches pour time, money, and resources into their church communications prior to Easter and it pays off with a full-sanctuary for multiple services. However, few churches have a continuing increase in attendance after Easter.

Brunch Invitation
You may have published a invitation to church or ministry brunch in your bulletin, but why not create a personalized invitation people can give out?

Easter week may have been fantastic, but without intentionally working on developing a continuing relationship with the people who only come at this time of year, we aren't communicating the total message of Easter. Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the grave to enable us to have an eternal relationship with him, not just a yearly visit to his church.

For the Easter activities of your church to build relationships, you may need to expand your goals in the communications you create for this time of year. The remainder of this article will give you some ideas on how to do this.

Make Easter a connecting point, not the end result

Invite friends to Easter
A bulletin insert like this will encourage your people to invite friends for Easter.

In the church communication production prior to the Easter season, almost everything is geared solely towards getting people to the Easter week services. Though this is a worthwhile goal, if it is your only goal, you'll not accomplish all you could to make a lasting impact in people's lives and in the growth of your church.

Instead of seeing Easter week attendance as the only goal and end result, consider changing your thinking and strategy. Look at Easter as a connection point between your community and Jesus and your church. You want to bring people into the church Easter week, but you don't want them to go away and never come back-you want them to meet Jesus, to begin and grow in a relationship with Him.  In addition, you want them to get to know your church and to enter into a continuing relationship with your church community.

To accomplish these purposes, you have to be very intentional long before Easter in not only the communications you create to get them there (which you most likely already have in place as you are reading this) but also in what you give people at each event or service during Easter week.

There are two overall areas in which you need to create communications at this time: communications to introduce and connect them to Jesus and communications to introduce and connect them to your church [Read more...]