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.

The silent, destructive communication war between Boomers and Millennials

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Generations need to learn to communicate

There is a silent war going on in churches today. Nobody talks about it and many in the church are not even aware it is going on, but it continues day after day and the injuries, both to individuals and to the Kingdom of God, are immense. This is the war of communication expectations between talking on the phone, email, and texting.

Though this conflict can happen between any members of the church, for purposes of this article, I’m going to over simply it by sharing what I’ve seen happen many times between Boomer and Millennial age groups. Though I’m using these two groups as examples, read into them “Boomer and older” and “Millennial and younger”.

I’ll first give some examples and then suggestions for ways to improve the situation.

Here are some typical skirmishes:

Situation #1:

A Boomer congregation member places a phone call to a Millennial Youth Pastor and leaves a message. No response. Boomer tries email. No response. Sunday comes around and Boomer angrily confronts Millennial, "I was going to give two scholarships to Winter Camp, but since you didn't have the courtesy to respond to my offer, the scholarship money has been donated elsewhere."

Millennial response, “I’m really sorry. I didn't get any of your messages.”

Situation #2:

Millennial Youth Pastor texts the Boomer age people in the church who have said they want to be part of the prayer team for youth. She is excited about the list she received from the church office and then sends them a series of Instagram links to images showing the kids they will be praying for at an upcoming strategy session at Starbucks.

When the time comes for the strategy session, only one person out of the 15 she sent multiple text messages to shows up. On Sunday, when she tries to be kind and asks why various Boomer individuals didn’t show up, she gets a combination of blank stares and replies of “You never contacted me” in response.

What is going on

In both groups, the person sending the message felt they were doing all they could to communicate. However, just sending a message is not the same as communicating a message. [Read more...]

Recruiting volunteers for the holidays–tell people what they don’t know

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Thanks Giving Volunteer Recruitment flyer
This is a copy of a flyer used to recruit volunteers for a Thanksgiving outreach. We need to communicate clearly all we've been planning if we want people to help. Just click on the flyer to download a PDF that is easier to read.

Yvon's note: this is an article from our archives that is worth repeating to encourage you to communicate how we need people to help with holiday events. Following are some practical ways we recruited for a successful sharing and service opportunity at our church.The article below was written when I was in the midst of recruiting and the results were fantastic. LOTS of people got involved, the event was extremely well attended, many helped, and many people were served.

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It is challenging to plan a ministry outreach for any holiday and even more so when we want to recruit volunteers to help with it. Because there are so many things to do for a successful outreach and our minds are preoccupied with the event. It is easy to short-change our congregations in how we communicate to them about what is going on and what we need them to do. People don't know what we need unless we ask specifically.

Here is a flyer we created to remedy that situation

As a very practical example of a way to ask in a specific way that will get the response you need, our Adult Sunday School Class is hosting a Thanksgiving outreach dinner. I've been working on it for some time and for it to be successful we need many in the class to be involved. Though they have known we are doing this for some time--we just got the final approval of the location last week. I needed to let the class know and to let them know what we needed  them to do.

My first idea was to simply do a PowerPoint Slide and announce it, but I knew that wasn't enough. I reminded myself of what I constantly try to teach that those of us who work and plan ministry events must always remember that the people we want to involve haven't been working on it as we have; they haven't been thinking and praying about it for as long as we have. They can't read our minds.

People need a tangible, paper, printed reminder of what we are doing and what we want them to do. Once the print piece is produced, we can put it on our information table for those who might have missed the first announcement and remind people about it in subsequent weeks. It can also be posted on the website and sent out in church emails.

We have to clearly share our vision and requests

We have a lot going on, we want people to do a number of things. Though in the coming weeks I will have specific task lists and sign-up sheets I wanted to give people a flyer that specifically told them:

  • what was going on
  • basic information
  • our goals
  • prayer requests
  • what we needed them to do

The flyer illustrated here is what I came up with. The information is what is most important here and it was well-received.

It seems like we never have the time to put together things like this, but they are vitally important for as many people as possible to be involved in ministry events and outreach.

For the longer article that discusses why we decided to do this kind of outreach, CLICK HERE.