Effective Church Communications

Community Outreach for Valentine’s Day—a door hanger sample and a postcard

31 January, 2017 By grhilligoss@gmail.com Leave a Comment

Valentines Door Hanger — A door hanger like this is a wonderful way to reach out to your community and invite them to church.

editor's note: I wanted to republish the article below because as I was going through my past articles on Valentine's Day outreach, her ideas are some of the best I've seen. I liked them so much, I created two Template collections for you to make Valentine's Day Outreach Door-hangers and Postcards. The links to them are at the end of the article.

Gayle Hilligoss, our wonderful columnist who writes so many helpful articles for us, also volunteers her time to help the communications at her church.

She recently sent me two WONDERFUL samples and I'm sharing them below. First is her brief explanation of them and then images to inspire you. I LOVE the idea of using door hangers as a Valentine's outreach for your church—what a happy way to invite people!

Gayle's email:

Did I ever send you these? The first is printed on door hanger stock.
We are putting them on 300 houses in a subdivision near the church.

The second is a postcard being sent to prospects, visitors, absentees, etc.
We are printing extras for our members to share as they have opportunity.
A couple of the projects of our new Outreach Team : )

[Read more...]

Are you sharing the most important message of your church?

29 January, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

The Gospel of salvation in Jesus is our most important message. — Are you clearly sharing the most important message of your church? People shouldn't have to search for it.

Note: I was recently asked for the location of my past article on "The Most Important Message of the Church." Following is the original article with links to the updated e-book and video presentation of it. It constantly amazes me how many churches are not clear about what it means to be a Christian and how to become one. Please take time to read this and look at the video to be sure your church isn't missing out on THE most important thing.

What is the most important message of your church? Obviously the answer to that is that the message of Gospel--of forgiveness of sins and eternal life in Jesus.

But do people know that after visiting your church? Stop a minute and think about it. When people spend an hour with you did you share with them:

great music?
inspired preaching?
information about activities for the family?
special events invitations?
small group or recovery ministry opportunities?

You probably did and these are all good things, but did you share the most important thing? Do they know that your church can help them find salvation in Jesus? Did you mention that at all in your sermon? Is it even hinted at in your bulletin? Or announcements?

I'm not writing this to make you feel guilty--but when I was recently collecting samples for an ebook, Gospel Presentations in Church Bulletins, I was surprised at how many (by far the majority) of both church bulletins and websites do not tell people how to get saved. Somehow the most important thing we are about gets lost in the announcements and events that fill the life of a church. Please don't think I'm saying that any of these activities in church or during the week are bad, but as the subtitle of the e-book says:

What does it profit a person to have clear directions to the potluck, but lose their own soul?

Correcting this is easy to do

[Read more...]

Templates: Valentines for believers, remember how much Jesus loves you!

28 January, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Valentines Encouragement Cards — Sometimes we forget how much God loves us--these cards will help us remember.

Sometimes before we can share the love of Jesus with others, we need to be reminded of it ourselves. Below is a set of Valentines Cards to encourage believers in Jesus how much he loves us and how we should love others.

The set is free and is in a downloadable ZIP file after the images. The ZIP files contains both PDF images and the original editable MS Publisher file.

The message below can be printed on the back of the cards, or used in other ways for Valentine's Day Outreach:

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be all about love—but, truth be told—it is often about disappointment.

Disappointment comes from human love, which may be wonderful, but somehow
always seems to fall short of our expectations and dreams.

We may blame it on Hollywood and the media, on unrealistic images, unobtainable fantasies, on novels and dreams. But, though our expectations and dreams may have flawed foundations, maybe it isn’t bad to be disappointed in human love.

Maybe it is a realistic reminder that we can never expect human love to fill the place in the human heart only God can fill.

When we realize that God loves us unconditionally, totally, fully, when we rest and rejoice in that, an interesting thing happens. . . . . .

The human love we get from imperfect humans isn’t disappointing anymore. Because God loves us in our imperfections, stumbles, and short-comings, He can help us love others as they really are, not as fantasies, but as real people as flawed as we all are.

When we accept and give His love, it’s a Valentine better than chocolate—relationships not built on disappointing dreams, but on honest, satisfying, acceptance of each other.

Images of the Valentine's Day Cards:

To download the ZIP file of the images in PDF format and MS Publisher format, CLICK the following link: Valentine Cards quarter page Believer encouragements

Templates: “Save the Date” Postcard, Bulletin Inserts, or Flyers

26 January, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

A member of Effective Church Communications asked if I had any "Save the Date" postcards templates. I didn't but I created some in response to her request.

Of course there is very little text on them as each church needs to add their own content, but you can do that in the MS Publisher file that is part of the ZIP file at the end of this post.

I made these half of an 8 1/2 by 11 page size so they could be printed used as either church bulletin inserts, flyers, or postcards. Often these will be posted on the refrigerator as a reminder so be sure to keep the most important information on one side of the card.

They are in a variety of styles for various ages and groups.

PLEASE let me know what church template sets you want to see created. I can't promise how quickly I will do them, but part of this site reorganization I'm doing is to organize and create more templates. Email me with what would be useful to you at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

Below is the free ZIP file that has the editable MS Publisher file and PDFs of the cards.

CLICK on the following link to download the ZIP file of the Postcards: Save the Date Cards

NEW Easter Templates Sets—PREVIEW and early downloads

17 January, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

This children's invitation is just one of dozens of Easter Templates that are coming.

As part of redoing many things on this site, I'm working on all new TEMPLATES for many Easter Communications. Below is a preview set of:

Easter Invitations Motivation flyers to get your congregation planning on who to invite,
Congregational Motivation flyers,
Children's materials featuring a "church bunny" and including the Jelly Bean Prayer,
Easter Connection Cards,
Easter Service Follow-up flyer

There will be more in the completed sets that will be released in the coming weeks along with tips on how to make the most of them. The samples below are in both MS Publisher editable files and PDF ready-to-print files. Below is a ZIP file where you can download them.

CLICK the following link to download the ZIP FILE of the Templates for the communications shown below: Preview Files for Easter 2017

CLICK on the first image and then you can see them larger in the Gallery view.