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.

Why just “Come to Easter at Our Church” isn’t enough–FREE invitations with short, but powerful messages

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The images in this collection are the least important part of them. Much more important is the message that reminds people why Jesus is the reason for the Easter Season.

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.

Not everyone knows that Easter has anything to do with anything spiritual

We often talk about how we need to remind people that "Jesus is the reason for the season" at Christmas, but no matter how secular the Christmas celebration, most people still know it had something to do with the birth of Jesus even if they don't think of it as particularly meaningful.

It's not like that for Easter. Biola University quoted a Barna study that shared statistics similar to many other studies:

About two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans surveyed related the holiday as something religious or spiritual. But just two percent said they thought it was about the birth of Christ and another two percent said it was about the rebirth of Jesus. Only 1 percent related it to the second coming of Jesus, while 3 percent just thought it was a celebration of spring or a pagan holiday.

Looking at the non-religious segment, 13 percent of Americans said they were not sure how to describe Easter. Many of their recurring answers were spring break, rebirth, hiding eggs, candy, children and bunnies.

http://chimes.biola.edu/story/2010/mar/23/easter-barna/

Don't do a bait and switch at Easter

If, as the above statistics show (and they are a few years old and I imagine the situation has gotten even worse) few people outside your church have a true idea of what Easter is about, if you send out something that only says something like "Come to Easter Celebrations at our Church" your audience will be thinking chocolate and brunch—not a challenging message and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus from the grave.

To not only give people an idea of what Easter is all about, but to get them thinking, asking questions about life and death and faith, I created some Easter invitations with thought-provoking messages.

There are many ways to use the invitations:

  • You can print them up as postcards as is or you can use any image you want with whatever message you want. An idea for how to get postcards out to your community without the church paying for postage is below the set of images.
  • You can use a related image and swap it out on the postcard layout.
  • If you have your own branded Easter theme, fell free to use the message part with any image you have.
  • I also have a separate file of just the text. You can use the text message in a newsletter, social media, or any way you would like to get the message out there.

Below the set of images is a ZIP file that has all the invitations in PDF ready-to print format and editable MS Publisher files. PLEASE CLICK on the first image below and it will enlarge to show you the text that goes with the images.

To download the ZIP file of the invitations, CLICK the following link: Easter INVITATIONS 2017

For a FREE file of the text alone that goes with the cards, CLICK HERE.

How to get out Postcards cost-effectively and in a way that will help your congregation grow in their faith

You can print these invitations at your church and then on Sunday put 5 invitations in everyone's bulletin. During the service the pastor can stand and say,

"As you can see you all have 5 Easter invitations in your bulletin. I know you've prayed for friends to invite to our Easter services and here is a tangible way to do it.

You can either mail the invitation or hand-deliver it to your friends. After that continue to pray and follow-up.

Offer to drive your friends to church on Easter and invite them to brunch afterwards to see if they have questions. You can invite them back next week and encourage them to become involved in the church on a continuing basis.

We all know we should be sharing our faith in Jesus and this is an easy and enjoyable way to do it!"

To start the motivation process to get your congregation excited about inviting friends, go to this article: Why it matters if you invite your friends to Easter services

Easter is the most important holiday of the Christian year—let's to all we can to fully involve our congregations and reach out to our community at this time.

Notes to Boomer church leaders as you prepare for Easter

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We may be shocked at today's culture and amazed at what people don't know about Easter, but we can't let those attitudes make us less effective as we reach out to our world with a clear message about the resurrection of Jesus. This article has some practical tips to help.

You don’t have to be an astute analyst of the culture to understand that we live in a far different world than Baby Boomers grew up in. Many Boomer church leaders may be aware of the changes in life, technology, and culture (“You can show that on TV now?), while at the same time planning for Easter church celebrations the same way they did when Ozzie, Harriet and family was the target audience. Being shocked about TV is one thing, sticking with outdated and ineffective ways to promote and celebrate Easter has far more serious consequences.

If you want share the power of our risen Lord in ways that will change people today and forever, you may need a new strategy, but before we get into that, let me be clear. . . .

This isn’t about Boomer bashing, any age group can make the same incorrect and ineffective assumptions

The mindset that needs a new strategy isn’t confined to any one age group, though many leaders in the Boomer generation seem to be stuck in it. I’m not bashing Boomers, this is my generation  and many of my peers in ministry provided the inspiration for this article. The mindset (not the age range) that I see with Boomer friends and church leaders of various ages, but similar mindset, assumes:

  1. People outside the church know the basics about the Christian faith and what’s in the Bible.
  2. Your community members know the story of Easter and are looking for a place to celebrate it.
  3. All we have to do to get them to get saved and be part of our church is to have the biggest, loudest, most colorful Easter service in town, complete with a petting zoo for kids and brunch served on the premises.

These assumptions range from totally incorrect to ineffective.

As we plan Easter outreach and celebration, we need to realize that contrary to the assumptions above:

[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...]

NEW Easter Templates Sets—PREVIEW and early downloads

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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.