Effective Church Communications
Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission
Don't panic, I'm not suggesting that every senior pastor or church leader drop the website creation and maintenance service they use, get a Mac; learn html, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. The current service you use may be working out fine and if you have an affinity for the Mac and high-end graphics you are most likely comfortable in your work. I'm not trying to change that, but to challenge you to learn more about the process if you've been primarily delegating your website creation to others.
Creating a custom header for a website can be an expensive and difficult process, but it can be a very simple process if you do it with MS Publisher. This video does not teach you how to do websites, but if you already have one, for example with WordPress, this will show you how to create your own custom header for it.
If you don't have a website as yet, not knowing how to create a custom header can hold some folks back because of the perceived cost or impossibility of doing your own. This short video (it is SO easy) will solve one possible concern...and it is really fun! [Read more...]
In Perelandra, the science fiction fantasy by C. S. Lewis, the primal battle between good and evil on a newly created world is fought by an unassuming scholar, thrust unwillingly into individual combat with personified evil. In the moments before their last, physical wrestling, his mind is wrestling with these thoughts:
The impudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! . . . What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself?
At that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and. . .freckled corporals who had lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions. . . [and in years past] Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision.
He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
from Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis
—when Ransom realizes his personal responsibility to fight evil personified
Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made.
Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
You are responsible for the effectiveness of your church communications, as this challenging quote from C. S. Lewis reminds us. Your church communications are effective if they make a significant contribution to, either through your personal outreach, individual ministries, or your church as a whole, people are coming to know Jesus as Savior and growing to maturity in their Christian lives.
Effective church communications can change the eternal destiny of individual people, enrich the lives of families and communities, and inspire compassion and service to a world desperately in need of sacrificial kindness.
You, as a church communicator have an immensely important calling. [Read more...]
Following the webinar on: How to Create and use a church communication survey, a number of you asked for the PowerPoint files so you could present this to your church leadership. In the attached ZIP file is the PowerPoint Presentation and the MS Publisher files. Both are editable.
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Click here to download the file.
In the Apostle Paul's farewell to the Ephesian elders, he gives us a summary of the responsibilities of leaders in church that also applies to those who lead in church communication:
For I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God. 28Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. 29I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. 30Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. 31So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears. Acts 20-27-31
Though Paul shares a number of challenges we can apply in our work as church communicators, one of them is especially difficult to apply:
As we communicate God's messages to his church, we need to make certain we are taking time to communicate all of it, the difficult parts as well as the more pleasant and encouraging ones.
We don't seem to have trouble communicating the upbeat and the positive, quoting God's promises and blessings and we should do that. Those messages alone, however are not the whole will of God and if that is all we are communicating we will present a distorted picture of the Christian message.
