Many of you may now be part of the leadership team of the church, but for those who may not be and for those who are timid in their job, following are some reasons why it is important you are part of this team.
Church Communications are what make ministry reality in the lives of the congregation and community
The church leadership team can come up with a great plan to get everyone in the church into small groups. They can come up with a fantastic slogan, a great curriculum, all the members of the leadership team may be personally committed to small group interaction for discipleship growth.
How does that become real in the lives of the members of the congregation?
It becomes real through communications—through the lists of small groups, the website entries, the brochures, the maps that tell people how to get to where they need to go, the social media and church apps that remind and report.
In many ways church communicators are entrusted with continuing the reality of the verse, "and the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us" (Jn. 1:14) by taking the ministries of the church and turning them into the tangible communications that enable the congregation and community to become part of the ministries of the church.
Church Communicators can give strategic advice to church leadership teams
One of my goals in Effective Church Communications is to give you the BIG picture of church communications and to help you see how vital they are in helping your church fully fulfill the Great
Commission. I've developed the Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing to help church communicators and in turn their churches see how all the communications we do should be going towards the goal of fully fulfilling the Great Commission, which means to help people either come to know Jesus as Savior or grow to maturity in Him.
Individual communications might be tiny steps in the overall mission of the church and in being obedient to the Great Commission, but church communicators can help the staff see that you aren't just "creating another Sunday bulletin" but that you are creating an essential link that will help INFORM and INCLUDE people in the church.
Please take time to CLICK HERE to go to an article that explains the FIVE STEPS in more detail and help your church staff understand the importance of each communication piece.
Church Communicators can provide a reality check
In a previous article, It may not be your fault that nobody shows up for a ministry event that you advertised heavily, I talked about the reasons why no matter how great your communication piece might be in terms of writing, design, frequency, and multi-media outreach, people simply might not respond.
The reasons they don't are often because of decisions by the leadership team. The purpose in saying that isn't to assign blame or point fingers, but to encourage church leadership to have church communicators as part of the decision-making team about what and how to promote events to the congregation.
We all have blind spots, we all see things other don't and by expanding the spiritual gifts and viewpoints involved in making decisions about church communications, we will have fewer failures that could have been avoided by an additional viewpoint.
Also, church communicators can provide reality checks on scheduling and costs of communication ideas. The church leadership team may come back from a church conference with a great idea of what worked in a church of 10,000 and want the home church of 150 people to implement it immediately. That rarely works and the church communicators often are the ones who are realistic about what the church can and can't do AND can often provide ideas and options for how the great idea might be adapted or modified for their church.
In scheduling church communicators can help the staff understand that if they want a devotional booklet written, designed, laid out, and printed before Lent or Advent, that the church communication team needs more than a week to work on it. It's not fair for church staffs to make major decisions involving big communication projects or holiday outreach campaigns without having input from church communicators from the start.
It's a biblical model
We are called into a body and with the Lord as leader, when church staff and church communicators can work together respectfully and productively the Lord is honored and the church will be more successful in reaching the world and growing disciples in the church.
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions!