In ministry we want people to respond to our message with tangible actions and to do that we need to create what this training article refers to as "ministry motivating communications."

In contrast to administrative or teaching communications, the purpose of ministry motivating communications, is to create a change in the lives of your audience. That change might be to encourage them to grow in their walk with Jesus, to become involved in a ministry, to donate time or money, to be challenged to share their faith. To be most effective creating these behavior responses, ministry motivating communications must involve the hearts and emotions of your audience in addition to their minds. When the heart is involved, people are more likely to take action. And to involve the heart, it's helpful to stimulate emotions to drive that response.

An important point needs to be clarified here. This isn't about creating artificial, falsely generated, ramped-up emotions. This is not about by-passing the mind—solid facts, statistics, and examples are part of the foundation of our communications, but to motivate to action, conviction, and life change, we often need to go beyond the facts.

Children dying of hunger; children without education or drinking water, young people sold into slavery, these issues and many more are worthy of our deepest emotions. We should cry. They should pull at our hearts. Some situations should make us sick to our stomach and angry.

When Christians do not grow in their faith, when they act in disobedience to God's Word and harm themselves and others, when they do not walk worthy of their calling and cause the Lord shame, whether from lack of teaching, not knowing any better, or outright disobedience, we shouldn't be indifferent. This is not how the Christian life is to be lived.

These situations need to be changed. The task of the Christian communicator is to share situations and stories, physically and spiritually, locally and globally, so that people will see the needs, feel them in their hearts, and respond in concrete actions.

We can do that in print and online writing, and in addition, video gives us a powerful tool to create ministry motivation communication. [Read more...]