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.

Church Halloween Celebrations: why simply having fun and not sinning is not the point of why we do what we do

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Halloween is about more than fun, it's an opportunity to share the gospel
If the reason for your Halloween outreach is only about kids having fun and getting lots of candy, you've missed a great opportunity to share the gospel.

Is having fun what defines a Christian? Is FUN what makes a church even worthwhile? Is fun why we do what we do (whatever it is) in the Christian life?

When you look at many church communications, you'd assume the answer was "yes." A recent scanning of material on the web as I was researching alternative Halloween events overwhelmingly advertised events or promoted activities where the FUN promised is promoted as the primary reason people should attend. Though the focus of this article is on the combination of Halloween communications and the emphasis of FUN (intentional shouting with the all capital letters), the same concerns and cautions apply to our communication of many church outreach events.

How fun becomes the primary motivation for Halloween alternative events

Much of the thinking process behind many of these "Christian" alternatives to Halloween on the web seems to go something like this:

  1. Halloween is evil.
  2. To take part in a traditional secular celebration of Halloween is evil and sinful.
  3. Christians shouldn't do evil and sin.
  4. Instead Christians should have good, clean fun.
  5. Therefore our church will do a fun event for Halloween.
  6. People will see we are Christians by our fun.

I don't have a problem with the list up to #3—much of traditional Halloween celebrations are evil. Maybe not as evil as some timid folks fear, but probably not activities that would fall into the class of edifying Christian activities. Dressing up as demons and witches and glorifying magic is not what Christians ought to be doing. Sending your kids out alone to beg for candy in most areas today isn't safe. But the alternative to fighting evil or working to fulfill the Great Commission is not to simply have safe fun. [Read more...]

Why we need to share the gospel at Halloween and the tools to help you do that

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In church communications, we do what we do because we believe that the eternal destinies of people depends on how they respond to Jesus. We know that--but in the midst of long days and overwhelming demands it is easy to forget.

As we approach Halloween, I know this isn't a holiday most people think of as being particularly spiritually challenging, but it really is. At this time of year, everyone is thinking about and talking about the supernatural and that makes it one of the easiest times to bring up the topic of the one person who conquered death--Jesus.

Erasing hell, a great motivational book for Halloween outreach
This book provides great motivation for Halloween outreach because it is a reminder of the eternal consequences of our decisions about Jesus.

Francis Chan's and Preston Sprinkle's book, Erasing Hell. In addition to being a very well-researched and well-written book, I greatly appreciated the tone of the book, which is one of gracious, gentle conviction.

Though the tone is gentle, the topic is about one of the hard issues of our faith--the eternal destiny of people who die without Jesus as Savior. Universalism, the idea that eventually everybody goes to heaven, is the popular answer today (one of the great promoters of this being Rob Bell's book, Love Wins), but popular as the idea might be, as this book shows through careful historical facts and careful biblical exegesis, universalism is simply wrong.

As much as we might wish it were otherwise, the eternal destiny of every person--literally heaven or hell depends on what we do with Jesus. Your job is to make that clear and that is why your work in church communication is of extraordinary importance. We can do that with our church communications and below is a list of communication resources for Halloween.

The purpose of this website is to help you create communications that enable your church to fully fulfill the Great Commission. That is why we do all we do.

[Read more...]