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.

Jesus, the Reason for the Season postcard, flyer, program cover or bulletin insert

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Jesus is the reason for the Season postcard
Our world needs to be reminded that Jesus truly is the "Reason for the Season." This publication can help you do that.

We know that Jesus is the reason we celebrate Christmas, we know Jesus is the reason for the season, but many of the people who visit your church or are in the neighborhood around it don't have any idea what that means. This communication piece will help.

Though it is done is a casual, upbeat style, the content is actually taken from the Nicene Creed, one of the most widely accepted creeds in the Christian Church and one that defines the identity and role of Jesus as our Savior. Below are pictures of the file. One is in color and one in grey scale. The grey scale looks good printed on some a rustic-looking or colored paper.

[Read more...]

GIS: BIBLE (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth) gospel tract cards

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Salvation Card, side one
These cards are a concise reminder of the core purpose of our churches: salvation in Jesus.

When I first saw these cards I was thrilled because I'd just finished writing:

However, in the midst of this huge spiritual hunger in our world, which is motivated by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, people are not coming to the one source, the Church, that is the only true source of eternal life, forgiveness, and peace through faith in Jesus.

This is not happening because the Church is deficient or Jesus is no longer Savior. This is happening because the church is not communicating who it is and how it can meet the deepest needs of people.

Very few people in our world today think of the Church (and local churches anywhere) as THE source of salvation, truth, or eternal life.

from: Declining church attendance and how your communications can help turn that around  (If you haven't read this yet, it is very important, please click on the title and you can go to it.)

I wrote this because I know many churches don't know how to share the main thing they are about: Salvation in Jesus.

Here is a church that has a clear focus on the essential of salvation in Jesus and has created a tool to help their people share it. Yes, it is very brief and you may want to add more to it, but please use this as an inspiration and starting point for a tool to equip your people.

Below are images of the front and back of the cards. Below them is a download for ECC Members (for information on prices and how to join, click here) in MS Word that you can modify for your church; the file also includes a ready-to-print PDF of them. I would strongly encourage that you put contact information on the cards so that if people have questions or want to respond to the message of Jesus, they have someone to contact.

CLICK on the link below to download the ZIP file containing the PDF and editable MS Word file.

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Here is the link: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/BASIC-Instruct.zip

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Declining church attendance and how your communications can help turn that around

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Stop Declining Church Attendance with Your Church Communications by Yvon Prehn

 

Church attendance is declining both in fewer new people coming to church and current members coming less often—that’s our challenge.

You know that the solution to this challenge isn't going to be solved by a 500-word blog post of bullet points about the latest and greatest tech tool or social media to come along that will solve all your church communication problems and get people flooding back to our churches. You know you won't be able to get people returning to church if you can simply find more contemporary graphics or upgrade to a more cutting-edge look to your website.

But we keep hoping don't we?

What follows is not a quick read filled with magic solutions. It will take time to read, digest, and plan out implementation because the issue of declining church attendance and retention is not an easy issue to understand with easy answers to fix it. There are many parts of church theology, growth, and health that factor in and what follows is not an all-inclusive solution, but one that can make a big difference in reversing this trend. [Read more...]

GIS: Bookmarks to remind people of God’s love and much more!

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Bible verse bookmark
This is the front and back of one of the bookmarks sent in for our Great Idea Swap. They are a great way to remind people of God's Word.

Bookmarks can accomplish so many purposes in church communications—you can use them to remind people about the truth of God's forever love; you can help them remember Bible verses; you can encourage Christian conduct and prayer. The Bookmark Templates in this selection do all those things.

All of them were sent in as part of our Great Idea Swap. Below are pictures of them for inspiration and then below that is a  ZIP file that has both the PDFs of the bookmarks and the editable either MS Word or MS Publisher original files for Effective Church Communication Members.

You can either modify them and change the name to your church on them, or because several of them are one-sided only you could put information about your church or an additional message on the other side.

Bookmarks are a great give-away for the holidays and if you create some, please send them in and share with us!

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GIS: Editable Church Conference Booklet TEMPLATE in MS Word

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Journal Cover for MS Word Template
This is the cover for a wonderful booklet design you can modify for many ministry uses in MS Word.

Of course one of the greatest benefits of our Great Idea Swap is the inspiration you get from looking at what other church communicators create, but even better is when you can take it and modify it for your own church communication uses. That's what you'll be able to do with this wonderful little conference notebook sent in by Vicki Coulter of Christ United Methodist Church.

It is made up of 8 1/2 x 11 in. pages folded in half, which is easy to print in small quantities at your church office. The sample was sent in as a PDF, which you can see the from pages illustrated below ( just 6 of 12 are illustrated). It's hard to see from the illustrations alone what a wonderful file it is, but you can immediately see how useful a layout like this can be for anything from Advent booklets to devotionals.

To make it useful for you, I then took the PDF and converted it to MS Word to see if that would work out so that you could edit it for your uses. That worked out well. CLICK on the first image and that will bring up a larger image and gallery you can scroll through to see the pages better.

However, when doing a conversion to MS Word, the tricky part is always making sure the pages print correctly double-sided and it does work! I also played around with creating a couple of alternate covers just for fun and that worked great also. The examples of them are below.

Everyone gets access to the ideas in our Great Idea Swap, but for Effective Church Communication Members, I also have a short video that shows how to be sure you have the correct print settings to print out the modified template, plus the PDF file and the MS Word file if you want to create your own booklet.

Two more fun samples sent in with the booklet [Read more...]