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.

YOU CAN DO IT! all the church communications you need to do, in-house, using your people, and at low cost

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You can do it! All you need to in church communications.
You can do it! All you need to in church communications.

For your church communications, we've come a long way since the start of the digital revolution.  As we've progressed, more and more of the tasks of communication that were difficult have become easier with the development of resources that enable your church to create cost-effective and professional results, in all areas of church communications.

I've launched this website to help you;  I've got lots of resources designed to help you and more will be released on a continuing basis. I trust the information here will give you  inspiration and practical training, but overall, again, and again, outside whatever I can provide, my core message  is YOU CAN DO IT!

YOU, in your church, with your people can create all the communications you need to reach the people the Lord called you to reach and to grow your congregation to Christian maturity.

The Lord calls and gifts his people to do his work-you may not feel like, you may not want to, but no matter how quickly changing the technology, no matter how old or young you are, no matter where your church is located or how small your budget, you can do all the communications you need to win your community to Jesus and to help your people grow in their faith.

Following are expanded reasons why you can and should do your communications work in-house, in your church, by your church people.

Content is primary and should be personal

In your communication ministry periodically it's important to remind ourselves why we communicate anything at all in the church. We are doing it to fully fulfill the Great Commission given to us by Jesus to go into all the world, preach the gospel, and make disciples. It isn't the technology that we use that is of primary importance, but the content of our message.

Though the core message of every church, salvation in Jesus, is the same for every church, every church will express the gospel in its own unique way and no one can express it better to the audience your church is called to reach than the people in your church. [Read more...]

VIDEO: Video review of Cute PDF, free PDF creator

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PDF stands for "portable document format."

Though there are many uses for PDFs, one of the most practical uses is that if you save a document as a PDF you can transfer it files created in ANY program from a volunteers home to be printed at the church office. For example, say a church communication volunteer only uses PrintShop, another only PageMaker, and the church office only has MS Word and MS Publisher. How do you print communications they create for the church?

This brief little video shows you a great little program you can use to create PDFs. Cute PDF is a free program (it has a paid version, but the free works great). For some specialized uses printers require PDFs be created with Adobe, (which costs $99-$499), but this program works great for most church communication uses

If they all have Cute PDF (which anyone can download for free), they can save the file as a PDF and then email it to the church. The church can print out the publication using the PDF and the church office does not need to have the program that created the communication.

The only negative of this situation is that any corrections need to be made by the original creator of the communication, but if all goes well this is a great tool.

Paper, Printing, and Production

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Paper work on caption
This PDF covers a variety of issues, some timeless, such as the importance of paper choice in the quality of your communications and some issues not so timeless, such as delivery methods.

Much of what we do in church communications is timeless—but some isn't and this chapter has a little bit of both.

It is a PDF reprint of my first book on desktop publishing. The information on paper is timeless. The paper choice you make has a big impact on your message and the PDF gives you some good tips for choosing the right paper. I encourage you to read it because there are always church communications pieces printed on paper that was not intentionally chosen, but randomly pulled from the shelf. This method of unthinking production is not a nice way to produce a publication someone labored for hours to produce; nor is it often effective if a cheap paper literally cheapens the message.

The material on printing and the advice on providing mockups is always a good idea.

The material about other production methods, e.g. audio tapes, CDs, is a bit of a retro look back. For many new to church communications, you cannot imagine how revolutionary and shocking it was for me to challenge church communicators to distribute content on CDs. Few computers had CD drives, CD audio was not wide-spread and the few CDs used for data distribution tended to be very expensive. To create movies with computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and to burn your own CDs was impossible. It wasn't until over 12 years later that I started to produce CDs and now their capacity seems a bit confining. All of that to emphasize a frequent refrain in this ministry: our tools will always be changing, but seize every one possible to communicate the gospel.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.
The chapter is from Yvon Prehn's first book on desktop publishing, The Desktop Publishing Remedy, published in 1993 by David C. Cook. The book has gone through numerous editions and reprintings since then and is still a useful source of basic instruction for church communicators. All of the chapters are for sale in both download and spiral bound versions at http://www.lulu.com/yvonprehn under the title of Back to Basics, foundational skills for church communicators.

We are unlimited in our potential to share the gospel message; what are we doing with it?

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Charles Spurgeon, in his introduction to Lectures To My Students, wrote:

Should this publication succeed, I hope very soon to issue similar work. . . . . I shall be obliged by any assistance rendered to the sale, for the price is unremunerative, and persons interested in our subjects are not numerous enough to secure a very large circulation; hence it is only by the kind aid of all appreciating friends that I shall be able to publish the rest of the contemplated series.

I often talk about the incredible opportunities available to us in communications today, but the reality of that statement struck me as never before when I read Spurgeon's words.

If I want to communicate something today, I do. I can blog. I can write for my websites. I can write, design, typeset, create a book and publish it with lulu.com, createspace.com, smashwords.com and many other sources. I can record a podcast and create a video at my computer. In minutes I can make these communications available to the world.

Spurgeon did not have that luxury.

The Prince of Preachers had to wait for his words to be published until enough money could be raised for the printing. We don't have to wait for anything beyond the moments it takes to upload our latest creation.

Enough has been said about how this instantaneous access to communication has cheapened public discourse; how any idiot with an opinion can become an instant authority or celebrity. The truth of those observations is obvious. Those who use technology need to handle the responsibility with care, but not with fear assuming that because a publication goes through the hands of a professional editor that  it will come out a better publication.

Professional editors can be extremely helpful and in my early years as a  writer I had the joy of working with tough newspaper and book editors who sharpened my skills. I'm not sure why, but it seems the precision and professional care of some so-called professional editors has deteriorated. In one of my more recent adventures with a national publishing company, (and I've had books published by a number of the major ones) I was given a very nice, but seriously grammatically challenged junior editor to work with on a book. He apparently thought my writing quite exciting—every few paragraphs he inserted exclamation points in addition to extensive and needless rewriting of much of my manuscript.

His flourishes did not make it into the final book. I'm trying to figure out a way to talk about this nicely, but the bottom line is that having to deal with the mess he made, being required going over his head to someone with authority to get permission to clean up the mess, all the time trying to be kind to him as a Christian sister, was a monumental and unnecessary waste of time. I can get a dozen articles written, five training videos, a couple of e-books created, and all of it posted on the web  in a portion of the time wasted on that adventure. When the book was published it came out with a typo on the cover.

Writers do not have to deal with editorial and book publishing company obstacles anymore to get their words into the public arena

We should not use this responsibility to create irresponsible communications. As much care and craftsmanship as is possible should go into our work. We should always be working to improve our writing, design skills, technology expertise, and growth in godliness as we do our work. Our opportunities are not an excuse for sloppy, unthinking work.

But work we must. Publish we must. If we feel we have been given a message from the Lord to share with a lost and dying world, if we feel we have words that can encourage the saints and build up others in the faith, we have absolutely no excuse to not get our message out there.

We have the words of eternal life. We have technology that gives us an ability to communicate far beyond our wildest dreams. What am I, what are you, doing with this opportunity?

To whom much is given, much is required.