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: Beyond the Easter Egg Hunt—ways to involve children in Easter outreach and evangelism

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Church Bunny Invitations What are you planning for children at your church and community this Easter?

In addition to fun, have you thought about how the children themselves can be involved in Easter outreach and evangelism?

Hi, I’m Yvon Prehn and welcome to the Effective Church Communications Podcast!

I’ve got some ideas for how you can do that in today’s podcast:

Beyond the Easter Egg Hunt—ways to involve children in Easter outreach and evangelism

Following are notes from the Podcast, along with links to the free templates talked about in it. [Read more...]

Free Church Bunny Easter Invitation to encourage children to be inviters

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Easter Church Bunny Invitation for kids to invite friends for Easter
An invitation like this can encourage kids to invite their friends for Easter.

Not only is Easter a wonderful time to host events for children, but it's a great time to train children to invite their friends to church. Seasonal celebrations are not only a time where you can grow your church in numbers, but you can also intentionally use it as a time to grow your people in discipleship when you provide tools for them to invite their friends.

In addition to the invitations, you can encourage them to pray for unchurched friends, offer to pick them up for Easter events, and invite them back in the following weeks. Not only adults, but children can be part of this and you can work on instilling life-long habits in them of inviting, praying for, and involving friends in church.

To help you do that, here is a FREE Church Bunny Easter invitation. If you click on it, you not only get the ready-to-print PDF as we've done with FREE church communications in the past, but you get a ZIP file that has the PDF and the editable MS Publisher file. CLICK HERE or on the image to go to it.

More choices available for the children at your church

In addition to the FREE Church Bunny Invitation above, there are additional free options below. To see a larger version of the invitation, click on any of them and you'll see an enlarged slide show.

Click on the link following to download the Church Bunny Easter Invitations above: Church Bunny Invitations

FREE Easter Jelly Bean Prayer for Children’s Ministry

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Jelly bean prayer

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.

Additional Jelly Bean Prayer Designs

To see the images larger, click on the first one and a slide show will come up.

To download the Jelly Bean Prayer file, click the following link: Jelly Bean Prayer

At the end of this article is the text for the Jelly Bean Prayer that you can use to create materials for Easter for Children. [Read more...]

PODCAST: Why just “Come to Easter at Our Church” isn’t enough in your Easter Outreach materials

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We have an opportunity to challenge people with the real meaning of Easter from the start with our invitations--this podcast has some messages you can use in your invitations and other communication resources.

What do you think it is in your Easter Outreach materials that will draw people outside the church to your Easter Services?

We know many people will visit our churches for Easter events—how can we connect them not only with the church, but with a relationship with Jesus?

I'm part of several church communication discussion groups and recently people have been sharing their outreach ideas for Easter. They all look great, but I am concerned that many of them simply say something like "Easter at whatever the church is." Now there is nothing wrong with that if you go to the church and want your people to know what time your services are being held. But there is a challenge with an invitation like that if you want to use Easter as a time to reach out to your community.

This podcast will remind you that many unchurched people have no idea why Churches celebrate Easter. They think it's all about bunnies and brunch; chocolate and Spring. We have a great opportunity from the time we send out our first invitational materials to remind them that Easter is about so much more.

[Read more...]

FREE: Thought-provoking text you can use for Easter Communications

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Explain in WORDS the meaning of Easter.
Though inspiring to believers, we need more than images to explain Easter to unchurched people.

It takes more than inspirational pictures to communicate the extraordinary truth of Easter and to convince people to accept the Jesus of Resurrection as their Savior and Lord.

Though your church might take months to interact and instruct explorers of the Christian faith, I wrote the text for our set of invitation cards to, I hope, to start them down a truthful path by letting them know from the beginning that this day is about more than music and chocolate (though both are wonderful parts of our celebrations). After looking them over, I thought they might be useful to you for social media, on the web, in your bulletin or any other Easter communication. You are free to use them in any way you want without attribution.

As powerful as images might be, we need WORDS to explain the Christian faith. Especially if you are reaching out to unchurched people, they know little to nothing about the images of Easter that are meaningful to you. The image might grab their attention and the words pique their interest to explore.

For the invitations that go with the text below, CLICK HERE.

Looking for something this Easter?

We all are.

It may not be as obvious as a child’s search for candy and Easter eggs, but we all search for something often undefined, but never gone from the whispers in our mind when all around is quiet.

To satisfy our search we collect experiences, toys, relationships, but after all that, often come to the same conclusion as did C.S. Lewis:

If I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Easter is about the other world, the other life Jesus makes possible.

Join us this Easter to find out more.

 

BE FOUND

Most of us go through life searching for something—

Success

Love

Experiences

Self-fulfillment

….all good things, but seldom do we quit searching even after we find them.

The extraordinary news of Easter is that life is that we can quit searching and allow ourselves to be found by Jesus.

That’s what He died and conquered death for—to bring the creation He loved back into a relationship with our Creator.

This Easter join us and learn to rest and learn what it means to let Jesus find you.

 

Easter is about so much more than you can imagine

What do you think your life would be like if you believed in the Jesus?

Boring? Constricted? An endless series of don’t do this or that? Intellectual suicide?

At Easter, consider. . . .

Christians claim that Jesus conquered death. If that’s true imagine what it would mean to become a friend and
follower of Jesus, Someone, totally and eternally ALIVE?

Someone who spoke and the worlds, galaxies, stars and starfish, came into being?

Someone who, when he walked the earth, played with
children, was a great party guest, healed sick people, loved enough to die for all of us.

Challenging, exciting, never-ending and never alone—more than you can ever imagine is the life you can
discover this Easter, in Jesus.

[Read more...]