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; we can help.

Why you shouldn’t plan too far ahead in church communications

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Plan ahead in your church communications, but do so cautiously.
Plan ahead in your church communications, but do so with wisdom and prayer.

At the start of the year, it's natural to want to do some planning, but planning can be both a positive and a negative thing. It's always challenging as I was reminded when several churches have asked how to create a communication plan for the next five to seven years. Each of them has mentioned that new technology can be costly and they want to be prepared, in their budgeting and for training. Though I admire their desire to be good stewards, planning ahead for five years in church communications, especially when it involves trying to figure out technology needs, is futile.

Could you have envisioned your communication world today five years ago?

Think about it. Five years ago, could you:

  • Have  imagined or planned for the iPhone and iPad?
  • Known texting would be a major way your youth group would communicate and your youth pastor would need a high-end mobile phone?
  • Have known that skill with Facebook  would be useful, if not essential, when you hire a church secretary?
  • Imagined that Tweeting would be a skill your senior Pastor might want to learn? Even known the meaning of Tweeting or that social media in any form would be able to overturn governments and raise millions for charity? [Read more...]

Woman in wet t-shirt on church website and why a picture may say a thousand wrong words

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Baptism Bay City
Some churches baptize in rivers, some in cathedrals, here in CA we baptize in hot tubs. But without a caption or explanation, people will not understand either the setting or the sacrament.

I was asked to look at and critique a church website. Before I could give any useful advice or comments, I asked the person who asked me to look at the website,"What is your purpose in creating the site?"

Websites can serve many purposes from outreach to disciple-making. Each purpose takes time and few churches have time to do all of them. Because of that I didn't want to critique the site unfairly. The person who asked me to critique the site said that they wanted primarily to attract and inform unchurched people about the church.

I clicked on the site and on the home page was one of the large format of scrolling picture boxes across the top. The images displayed were of a young woman being helped out of the water of a hot tub, a close up of her smiling with a wet  t-shirt clinging tightly to her; then a shot of her as she is  hugged by a couple of  guys.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry before I commented on the website.

How images that are meaningful to us, may be confusing to others [Read more...]

Why you CAN and SHOULD create your own blogs and websites

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It's much easier than you imagine to create a blog.
It's much easier and more important than you imagine to create a blog.

Don't panic, I'm not suggesting that every senior pastor or church leader drop the website creation and maintenance service they use, get a Mac; learn html, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. The current service you use may be working out fine and if you have an affinity for the Mac and high-end graphics you are most likely comfortable in your work. I'm not trying to change that, but to challenge you to learn more about the process if you've been primarily delegating your website creation to others.

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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...]