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.

Triage, a model for responding to connection cards

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Triage your connection cards
In a medical emergency, the first responders immediately triage victims to see who needs immediate care. That's a great examples to follow on processing connection cards.

Ed. intro: When you host a special event or seasonal celebration, you'll have lots of visitors and you'll be collecting lots of visitor cards from them. But you've got to do more than just collect them if you want them to make a difference in your church. You'll learn what to do from this excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

It is critically important to respond to the connection cards received each Sunday and all special occasions, but not every card needs the same timeliness or intensity of response, but how do you decide what needs what? The concept of triage can help.

First, here is the history and definition of TRIAGE from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia:

TRIAGE
The term [triage] comes from battlefield or natural disaster situations. When the wounded are brought in there are three categories in which the wounded are immediately placed:

Red / Immediate
They require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.

Yellow / Observation
Their condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).

Green / Wait (walking wounded)
They will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day (broken bones without compound fractures, many soft tissue injuries).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

How to apply triage to connection cards

Though you aren’t dealing with actual battlefield situations, this model is useful in responding to the connection cards you will receive from those fighting spiritual battles each week. Following are suggestions for how to apply the three levels of triage in how you respond to the people turning in connection cards: [Read more...]

Connection Cards: church service distraction or great ministry tool?

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Connection cards, are they a great tool or church service distraction?
Connection cards, are they a great tool or church service distraction--please share your comments.

I recently received the following email (only slightly edited for privacy) with a practical ministry question about Connection Cards and how to avoid the time filling out the cards and collecting them more than an awkward break in the service. Following the email, I have some advice, but PLEASE add your comments and practices in the comment section that follows.

Question about Connection Cards

I have a question or two concerning having the whole congregation fill out connection cards during the service time. I know you believe this a very important part of the Sunday morning church service. I have read several church leaders that agree.

I am Director of Administration for our church and have approached our Senior Pastor about doing this. He has been the pastor for 25 years so he is a very experienced pastor. When I first mentioned us possibly doing this he said he could not imagine having a break in the service where pretty much everything comes to a standstill while hundreds of people fill out these cards. He said he would think it would be a real "flow" breaker if you know what I mean...however he cares more about doing what is best for the body of our church than not wanting to try something new. So, he is willing to give this a try but I have a couple of questions that I'd like to ask you so I will have more information to approach him with...

What would you estimate the time to be to complete these cards? Each service would have around 200 people in it....Would you estimate 2 or 3 minutes or something much shorter like 30 seconds?

Also, when other churches do this do they have something going on at the same time or does everything come to a standstill while they are being filled out?

My answer

[Read more...]

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

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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...]

The Six Benefits of reading (or listening to) the Bible in Chronological order and probably why you haven’t done it

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Thru the Bible In Chronological Order Lesson #1 6 Reasons Why Yvon's note: this is from my Bible Blog and podcast website: www.bible805.com. For all of 2019 my project was to first, share why we can trust our Bibles (lessons from history), and then to go through the Bible in Chronological order with my commentary on readings each week. I finished the project (whew!....) at the end of 2019, but all of the podcasts and notes are available for you on the site if you would like to go through the plan anytime. In the following year, I'll be doing various topical studies for the podcast each week. The reason I'm including this on the Effective Church Communications website is because Church Communicators need to be spiritually strong to communicate for the kingdom of God and to be spiritually strong, you must know God's Word. In addition to working in church communications, I have a Master's Degree in Church History, attended seminary, taught church history at a Jesuit university and love teaching the Bible. The podcast is available on iTunes and many other podcast channels. For links to all of them and to all of last-year's podcasts, go here.

Podcast Intro:

Along with losing weight, getting more done, simplifying your life and other commendable goals, is reading through the Bible one of your resolutions for the year? Do you know how many books are in the Bible?

If so, I’d like to share a way for you to do it that will change your life more significantly than any diet will!

Hi, I’m Yvon Prehn and Welcome to Bible 805!

Today we’re going t to talk about…..

The Six Benefits of reading (or listening to) the Bible in Chronological order, and probably why you haven’t done it

There are many ways to read through the Bible each year—but there is one that is by far the BEST way to do it (and I’ll be going into the reasons why it’s best shortly) and that is to read through the Bible in Chronological order. That means to read the books (or parts in some cases) in the order they happened, not the order you find them in the Bible.

Don’t worry about figuring that order out—I’ve got a schedule you can download to do it and I’ll be doing podcasts in the coming year to guide you through it. (starting Jan. 6 for 2019)

But for now, since reading through the Bible in Chronological order is a somewhat daunting task, it's worth asking why do it? To answer, ask yourself, why read anything, watch any movie, learn any new information in a certain order? [Read more...]

FREE Templates and motivational articles: Read through the Bible in a year—Templates for handouts, booklets

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One of the most important things you can do for your congregation is to encourage them to read through the Bible in a year in chronological order. I've created a printed schedule, booklets, and motivational articles to help you do that. Now is a great time to be planning ahead to do this.

All of it FREE to everyone. Please pass on and share with others.

This post has:

  • A short summary of why it is important to read the Bible in chronological order this is beneficial, at the end of this post are two more articles. You can use these in any of your communications to encourage your people.
  • Handouts for the schedule in MS Word
  • A Booklet of the Schedule in MS Publisher
  •  A short video that shows you how to create the booklet
  • Two more motivational articles from my Bible blog, www.bible805.com

[Read more...]