Effective Church Communications

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

13 February, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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

13 March, 2021 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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...]

Church connection and prayer request cards—the foundation of all other church communications

20 January, 2020 By Yvon Prehn 4 Comments

Connection Card book by Yvon Prehn — Prayer request cards and connection cards are a great way to connect with visitors and the needs of your congregation.

In church communications, we are often like Elijah-we expect God to speak through the thunder and storm. But what God often uses is similar to how he ultimately spoke to Elijah—through a still small voice.

The place of connection cards and prayer request cards in your church communication ministry is similar. They appear tiny and unimportant in the great scheme of multi-media communications available, but if you don't use them correctly, your church will probably not connect with visitors as well as you could if you used them.

Yes, there are lots of things churches do and communications churches create that connect with visitors, but helpful as most of them are, they fall short in one area. Churches have visitor centers, visitor pads, friendly people but......

Their short-coming is that all of them require the person to reach out to you.

You can't reach out to many visitors because you won't even know they are there. The ability for people to reach back to you, to share their contact information, their needs and questions is the function of connection cards. The book Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people goes into detail on how to make the most of these essential ministry tool, but this article will give you a good starting overview of their usefulness.

The purpose of these connection and prayer request cards

We don't create these cards to wow people with great graphic design or to give something for kids to scribble on during the church service. They are created to make a connection and connecting people to God and each other is what the church is all about. We must keep this importance in mind, because having people fill out connection cards is often viewed as an unnecessary interruption to the Sunday morning service and recording and dealing with them is often a bother on Monday. In contrast to these attitudes, if used properly, connection cards and prayer request cards can:

have a HUGE impact on growing your church
connect people to the life of your church
care for and address spiritual needs in practical ways
and help your people grow to spiritual maturity

You must move past looking at these cards as merely ministry routine paperwork and see them as essential tools to grow your church and change lives, if you are to make the most of them.

Why this is so important

[Read more...]

FREE Easter Jelly Bean Prayer for Children’s Ministry

23 March, 2019 By Yvon Prehn 1 Comment

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.