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 Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission.

PODCAST: Was Jesus a Zombie? Consider this question before you finalize your Easter Sermon

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Jesus is AliveWas Jesus a zombie? Please understand, there is no irreverence or shock value intended with this question. It was an honestly asked question from someone who was totally unfamiliar with church.

After I got over my shock of being asked this question (and a short time later I was asked it from someone else), I did a podcast that coincided with Halloween, but I think it is also appropriate for the Easter Season so I am re-recording it for Effective Church Communications.

The rest of the podcast is primarily directed towards people outside the church, but I'm sharing it with church communicators and I hope with Pastors and those who prepare sermons for Easter to help you remember that if you did a good job on outreach to get unchurched people to come to your church for Easter, you need to think carefully about the audience you'll have. Many more people than those of us who grew up in the church can imagine did not grow up with ANY exposure to the church or the Bible. The implications of that reality are vast. You can't count on them knowing anything about the true story of Jesus, but they will come into the church with many pop culture ideas about life after death. I can't tackle them all, but now I'd like to tackle just one aspect of it—the question of........

 

Was Jesus a Zombie?

When you think about it calmly, if you are someone who doesn't go to church regularly, it really is a very good question because the only conception many people have today of a person who has come back from the dead is a zombie. So when someone hears Jesus came back from the dead, that's immediately what they think about. Easter is all about Jesus coming back from the dead, but as we'll see in the podcast today, how Jesus came back from the dead is very different from coming back as a zombie.

So what do we know about Jesus coming back from the dead?

[Read more...]

Effective WEBSITE strategy for Children’s Easter follow-up and a handout to go with it

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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...]

Modifications for Mother’s Day this year, a FREE ebook to challenge your thinking, and links to the timeless One Mother’s Prayers

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Sad plate
We may not be able to celebrate Mother's Day the way we have in the past, but here are some free resources that may be helpful.

This year we have many challenges with new ways to celebrate special events in our churches.

Yes, it is a challenge and can be difficult, but it's also a great time to stop and think about what makes a holiday truly special, and what are some timeless ways we can celebrate it?

We can evaluate what we've always done because it's a tradition and ask ourselves what do we do that is truly meaningful and honors the Lord and His people as we celebrate?

Mother's Day might be one of the most challenging times of all because it is when we tangibly and in very public ways celebrate the moms in our churches. It can also be a painful time for women who aren't mothers as they silently smile at the service and cry later alone at home.

Past challenges to expand your thinking on Mother's Day

I've often reminded churches that the reason Mother's Day Sunday gets the biggest attendance of the year just behind Christmas and Easter is not because of the moms who are there. They are there every Sunday. It gets the big attendance it does because on that Sunday the unchurched kids and spouses who don't normally come to church will come to make mom happy. [Read more...]

Free Islamic-looking (English letters) font for Ramadan publications or other times it might be appropriate

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Ramadan alone--share a kind note
I don't know the challenges of celebrating Ramadan alone, but we can acknowledge that we care to our Muslim friends.

Current note April 2020: it is currently the time of Ramadan for our Muslim neighbors and it is an especially challenging time because of the intensely social nature of Ramadan and the current restrictions because of the social distancing requirements many are wanting to follow. A kind note to a Muslim friend might be appropriate. I recently received an email from a Muslim friend and though I honestly didn't know what to say, I wanted them to know that I was acknowledging the challenges they were facing—it was meant as a gentle virtual hug and I hope accepted that way.

You don't have to use the fonts below to write the note, but in case you want to use them at some time for a related topic, this seemed like a good time to share this again.

Past post:

Whether it is for the month of Ramadan or any time that you want to create communications about the Muslim religion, a font that has an Islamic look while still using English letters, is useful. Below is a very short video that shows the website for a variety of useful Islamic looking fonts and below it is the link to the site.

Here is the link to the fonts:

Islamic looking fonts--for free downloads of fonts:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=202

Do check out the site for other fonts that look interesting--there are a lot of them.

Video of how to download them:

 

 

Islamic looking fonts--for free downloads of fonts:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=202

 

One Mother’s Prayer, a free and inspiring story for however you want to use it for Mother’s Day

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One Mother's Prayer
This piece a perfect handout for Mother's Day or any time you want encourage people to pray for children.

This short piece, One Mother's Prayer, is a true story that is both an encouragement to pray for children and an assurance of the power of prayer to change a destiny.

It has been published more times than anything else I've written. It was first published in Today's Christian Woman magazine. Then in their Best of Ten Years of writings, it has been reprinted and republished all over the world, and it continues to bring tears to the eyes of any group I read it to. You are free to use it any way you want and share it however you want.

Below is a Free ZIP FILE of PDF formats: 2 more 8 1/2 by 11 plus 4 other versions on half sheet size plus the jpgs of the larger files and an MS Word text file if you want to create your own publication. The text file and the link to all the other downloads are after the images below if you want to use it in a newsletter or social media.

This is a great resource not only for Mother's Day, but any time of the year for Mom's groups and prayer groups.

Last year (2019) I also made a PODCAST recording of it. Here is the embed code if you want to put it on your website or any kind of social media:
<iframe src="https://anchor.fm/yvon-prehn/embed/episodes/SPECIAL-PODCAST-Yvon-Prehn-reading-One-Mothers-Prayer-e3usu0" height="102px" width="400px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">

You can listen to it here:

Full Page Size Print versions of One Mother's Prayer

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Half-page size One Mothers Prayer (two additional ones on Members PDF that aren't shown here)

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Text of One Mother's Prayer--

Her worst fears had come true. Her son had become involved in a strange mystical religion. She had such high hopes for him. Since his infancy she prayed God would touch his life. Her husband wasn’t a Christian and sometimes, in a temper, would taunt her praying, but she kept on.

Her son grew up in a small town. The family owed their home, but they weren’t wealthy. Determined their son would have a good education, they scrimped and saved to send him to school. Somehow his brother and sister didn’t receive the same attention or prayers.

He did extremely well in school. People began to notice his brilliant mind. A prominent citizen of the town set up a scholarship for her son’s graduate studies. She was so proud. Her joy diminished with worries about his spiritual health. He attended church some, but he refused baptism. And there were little incidents—stealing, things like that. She worried and she prayed.

He excelled in graduate school and finished with high expectations. But his religion . . . his letters contained long explanations of finding true reality and speculation how reality divided into darkness and light. Jesus was not truly God incarnate, he said, but an example of pure light entrapped and suffering in matter. He had always been good with words, but these words wounded her.

She decided to visit him. She thought her heart could stand no more pain, but she was wrong. He was living with a girl and they weren’t married. They had a son. She was a grandmother, but she couldn’t be proud of it.

In desperation she explained the situation to her minister. He told her that the son of so many tears could never come to destruction. Somehow the message seemed from God.

The years passed. Her son was unhappy with his job; he was often ill. He left the girl but kept the son. Finally he became disillusioned with his mystical religion and began to question her about God. He started to go to church again. There he found Christian friends and questioned them. He began to read the Bible.

Her prayers increased. Her husband died, but he had become a Christian in his final illness. She, too, grew weaker, older. She feared she would die before the prayers for her son were answered.

Her grandson was a teenager now and she went to visit. A changed son met her—a son hungry to know about God, asking questions, requesting prayer. A son who would one day rush to tell her he had given his life to God by trusting Jesus as his personal savior. At Easter her son and grandson were baptized.

Their times together now were so precious, talking about the Lord and praying together. Her prayers overflowed with thanks but still she desired much more for her son. She knew her son as a Christian less than a year. In the August after his Easter baptism she breathed her last and went home to the Savior, to whom she had spent so much of her life talking.

She never saw with earthly eyes the great man of God her son became. She never heard his great sermons or read writings that determined much of Christian theology. She never knew her son’s insights would jog Martin Luther into seeing that one is justified by faith alone. She would never hear her son’s words that caused so many hearts to consider Jesus as Savior:

“Thou hast made us for thyself, oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

Every part of this story is true—the mother who prayed was Monica, the mother of St. Augustine.

Download section:

CLICK HERE to download a ZIP file that contains:

* All of the One Mothers Prayer versions
*MS Word text file of the text for you to use in any way you want
* MS Publisher Original files (you must have MS Publisher to use this file)
* PDF Files
* Resizable jpg files

After you download the file, SAVE it to your computer, then click on it to "unzip" it and the files are ready for you to use.

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