Is Your Church Communication Missing This Vital Ingredient?

When Who You Are = Who You Say You Are = Who Others Say You Are, then congratulations — you’ve achieved coherence.

1. Who You Are: Your history, mission, stories, language, traditions, relationships
2. Who You Say You Are: Your marketing messages online and off, colors, logos, apparel, etc.
3. Who Others Say You Are: Understand misperceptions, and what others think of you.

Who Are These “Others”? Examples of A Church’s Audiences:

• Members
• Regular Attendees
• Occasional Attendees
• Neighbors
• City locals
• Local affiliations (seminaries, Bible colleges, recording studios, Christian businesses)
• Denominational or network affiliates and leaders
• Blogosphere

Obviously some of these categories are more

Discover The Idea You Need For Your Mother’s Day Church Service

A Mother’s Day church service is a good chance for your church to show that it cares for the moms in your midst. It can even play a part in mending strained relationships and in getting those in need of Christ to attend your service and see what a grace-filled, cross-centered, kingdom-focused church community is all about.

You have to get people to come, though. And while your church may be able to afford radio campaigns, billboards, free brunch and other budget-busters, there is one idea that costs little or no money and has proven (at our church, Sojourn) to be a useful, well enjoyed gift to moms in our community: free family photos.

Have you scheduled a family portrait sitting lately? They are often expensive, and inconvenient for all involved. Why not tell your family, “Just come to church with me, and we can get a free portrait made before or after the service”?

How To Offer Family Photos At Mother’s Day Worship Service:

You don’t need to hire an outside photographer if you use volunteers. This is especially easy if you cultivate the value of servanthood in your church, and you develop a Church Photography Ministry. But even if you haven’t done so until now, you’ve probably got at least one or two good photographers in your midst. Encourage them to use their gifts. It amazes me that many people don’t even know they can use the talents and desires God has given them in service to him, beyond the usual church volunteer opportunities like children’s ministry, greeters, communion servers or parking attendants (all valuable roles, to be sure).

If your photographer takes portraits for a living, let her offer her business card to families after taking their free photo at the church. This could be a way for her to cultivate future clients — just make sure she doesn’t give a “hard sell” for her services. Something like “Here’s my card, if you ever need more portraits or want to get photos with a variety of backgrounds, techniques, etc.”

How To Get The Free Portraits To Your Church Attendees:

If your church budget allows, you could have all photos printed, then get volunteers or church staff to fit them into cardboard frames and mail them to each family. If you’re on a tighter budget — or perhaps even if your church is a young group of heavy social media users, upload them to an internet photo service that will allow you to email, embed or upload them to websites and Facebook.

We’ve used Yogile.com at Sojourn (for our church 10th Anniversary Party). This may work especially well if you have multiple volunteer photographers. They don’t have to set up an account or jump through any hoops. You set up a church account, create an album with a title like:

Community Church Mother’s Day Portraits, 2012

and then have your photographers upload photos to that album. From there, each photo is easily shareable to social media and websites, and printable as well.

At Sojourn Church we’ve also uploaded Mother’s Day photos to our church Flickr account, and then shared some of the photos on our blogs. Whatever you do, make sure you take each family’s relevant information so you can get the photos to them: whether physical address, email or Facebook URL.

When we talk about Mother’s Day, we always say:

• Invite your mom
• Invite your kids
• Invite your grandma, your aunt, your nanny, your grandchildren
• Invite someone who has been like a mother to you
• Invite someone who has been like a child to you
• Invite someone who needs a family

Many of them will come if only you ask — especially if you say you’d like to have their picture taken with you.

Mother’s Day may be a national holiday rather than part of the Christian liturgical year, but God ordained and blessed motherhood from the beginning. Don’t miss the chance to honor mothers and to make them feel welcome, whether they are already believers or not.

•  All photos here by Tom Branch at Sojourn J-Town, except photo #3 taken by Michael Winters at Sojourn Midtown

3 Church Website Mistakes That Make You Look Like A Pawn Shop

It’s no secret that church websites are among the most derided and lampooned in the web design community. Churches make many mistakes, including even simple ones like failing to list location and service times in a prominent place.

Here are three big mistakes that make church websites look like an unkempt pawn shop, a junkyard, or just a dirty, messy house:

1. Including Everything But The Kitchen Sink On The Home Page

And I mean everything. I’ve seen church websites that include a widget weather report on the home page.

Don’t be that church. Christians have a tendency to circle the wagons and create subcultures that eliminate the need for us to ever leave the circle.

It isn’t just Christians, of course. At Babel, God had to mix up everyone’s languages to get them to spread out. But Christians especially should not do this, because it goes against our gospel mandate from Christ (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8). Yet even the early Church clung to Jerusalem until forced by persecution to scatter (Acts 8:1).

Let your people find the weather report on the Weather Channel or their local news websites. Don’t try to be their “one home for everything” on the web.

And you should even keep minor church announcements and event promotion off your home page. Communicating too many messages is like communicating no message. Focus.

Imagine your church is like a house. You may like to shop. Perhaps you find item after item that would look great in your house. So you keep buying furniture, paintings, knick knacks and other house hold items. Maybe each of those items, on its own, looks beautiful or provides a good function. But all together, they make your house look like a bloated monster that needs to belch out all of that stuff in a good yard sale.

#2

How To Do A Church Press Release Without Annoying The Press

This antique Underwood typewriter in my office reminds me of the ambience of journalism's Golden Years

I love journalism. Visit me in my Sojourn Church staff office where I work as Director of Communications, and you’ll find biographies on my shelf of both Pulitzers, Henry Luce, the Bingham family, Edward R. Murrow, and books like Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post and Bob Greene’s ode to the newspaper industry Late Edition: A Love Story.

Which is why, even as a Director of Communications, I have too much respect for journalists to waste their time with press releases that wouldn’t legitimately make for a good story. And even if you don’t love the press, I hope to instill that respect in you. It’s to your church’s advantage.

When Should You Send A Press Release?

When you have something interesting to report. Think of yourself as a journalist’s partner, not as an (m)ad man. If you want to buy an ad, buy an ad. But if you want a reporter to do a story on something going on in the life of your church, then put yourself in the reporter’s shoes, and his or her reader’s shoes.

Don’t Waste The Reporter’s Time

Journalists have a tough job with tight deadlines. Part of their success will be determined by their nose for a good story. They’re constantly sifting through leads, tips and press releases, looking for stories they feel will be helpful, relevant and interesting to their readers. If they can’t find news that fits these categories, they won’t last long in their field.

What Criteria Will Help Determine This?

It depends on factors like the size of your church, the size of your city and the situations your city finds itself in. If you’re

The Top Reason For Ineffective Church Communication

Sojourn Communications team, L. to R: Michael Winters, Amanda Edmondson, Daniel Montgomery, Bobby Gilles, Chris Bennett

It isn’t cheesy road signs. It isn’t an out-of-date website. It isn’t clip art. Believe it or not, there is one thing even worse, and perhaps just as prevalent or even more so in churches around the world. The number one reason that church communication is ineffective is …

When the communication ministry is disconnected from the vision of your Lead Pastor.

This may seem obvious, but as Director of Communications at Sojourn Community Church, I’ve talked with many counterparts at other churches who say things like:

• I’m pretty sure my senior pastor has no idea what I do on staff.
• I haven’t been in a meeting with our pastor since the staff retreat last year.
• Our Lead Pastor runs his own communications through his secretary, and I communicate for our other ministries.

and many more comments like this.

At Sojourn, it was never quite this bad but we did have to make an adjustment over a year ago. As we’ve grown rapidly from a single-campus church of a few hundred to a four-campus church of over 3000, communication has gotten much more complicated. More campuses, more ministries, more staff, more elders and deacons, more outreach. This is all good, but the tendency is to move in so many different directions that the overall vision and mission of a church gets lost.

Until the beginning of 2010, Sojourn communications was a ministry of “central operations.” I had little interaction with our founder and Lead Pastor Daniel Montgomery. What ended up happening is that Pastor Daniel would preach on Sundays and would try to communicate vision and big picture things during the week, only to see the vision drowned in lots of major promotional pushes for ministry events — including even small classes.

Need Help Fighting Email Overload in Internal Church Communications?

Flush multiple all-staff emails down the pipes ...

Email is a good thing. Email is a bad thing. Sometimes, the bigger your church staff gets, the more it can seem like a bad thing. Most of us who work on church staffs have spent entire days doing nothing but reading and answering emails.

Much of this is inevitable, and much of it depends on the personalities and church culture involved (for instance, I prefer email to phone calls).

But what about all those staff-wide emails that each ministry sends out, alerting everyone else on staff of things like:

• Remember to turn in your updated insurance forms by Tuesday.
• All hands on deck for baby dedications this Sunday. Help our Connect Team with crowd control.
• On Tuesday, we’ll be painting in the children’s ministry wing so stay out.
• Welcome _______ to the staff. She is our new Groups administrative assistant.

And on, and on, and on.

At Sojourn, we decided to do away with all the separate emails like the examples above. Now, as Director of Communications, I send one email a week each Wednesday. This email is a collection of need-to-know announcements from the various ministries and our central operations team. I also list the sermon text/topics for the next 6 weeks of our Sunday services, so all staff and interns can stay onboard with where we’re headed as a church.

Enter The Weekly Dump

For the first few months of this experiment, our Director of Administration Jenny Holzer sent out the weekly email. Jenny is on the central operations team, under our Executive Pastor Brian Howard.  Central Opps originally called this email “The Weekly Dump,” perhaps not realizing the toilet bowl connotation. After a couple weeks of heckling, they changed it to “The Weekly.”

Then we decided

How To Build Your Tribe

Learn the #1 tip to building your tribe in just over 30 seconds, via Think TV‘s interview with Bryan Allain:

Bryan has written for Stuff Christians Like, Relevant Magazine and other publications. He is hosting the Killer Tribes Conference on March 31 in Nashville, which will feature speakers like Derek Webb, Sara Mae, Stephen Brewster and many others. Kristen and I will be there, and hope to meet some of you.

Learn about Killer Tribes here, and in the video below:

Church Communications Update: Band Of Bloggers 2012 Registration Is Open

Band of Bloggers is a yearly event for Christian bloggers which began in 2006. I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in all but the first Band of Bloggers, and am excited that registration is now open for the 2012 Band of Bloggers: From An Underestimated Resurgence here in Louisville on April 10. For $15 you get to attend, each lunch and receive 17 books, from a variety of publishers. That, my friends, is an amazing deal. Learn more at the link above, or go straight to the registration form here – it will sell out quickly. Below, I’ll share some thoughts on this event and a gallery of past event photos, taken by my Sojourn photography deacon Chuck Heeke.

But first, check out Tony Kummer‘s 4-minute recap of the 2010 Band of Bloggers in Louisville. And take note of the spiffy 4×4 Ford Explorer from which volunteers are removing gift bags full of free books for attendees. That’s mine. My truck, the video star. And the song in the background is “Mourning Into Dancing,” written by my friend Jeremy Quillo and recorded by Sojourn.

This year, the discussion will consider the impact –good and bad– of blogging and technology in the church, particularly what is sometimes called the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement.

Panelists leading the discussion this year include

Learn The Current Trends in Church Communications In 3 Minutes

A few months ago we featured Kem Meyer as part of our My Song In The Night interview series. Kem is the Director of Communications at Granger Community Church, a noted conference speaker and the author of one of my Top 10 Books on Church Communications, Less Clutter, Less Noise: Beyond Bulletins, Brochures and Bake Sales. Now, watch this 3-minute video from Think International to hear Kem talk about 2012 Trends in Church Communications.

Watch the full 20-minute “Less  Clutter, Less Noise” Think International interview with Kem Meyer below, and learn (among other things) why Kem says we should think “progressive dinner” rather than “potluck” in our church communication strategies:

Church Graphic Design: See Sojourn’s 2011 Event Posters

Sojourn Community Church is blessed to have Bryan Patrick Todd among our members. Besides being a dedicated brother in Christ, he’s a talented freelance graphic designer here in Louisville and around the U.S.

Not only can you check out his portfolio anytime at bryanpatricktodd.com, but he’s recently published a blog post  with thumbnail views of all the posters he designed for me at Sojourn last year. If you’re interested in graphic design or church communications, take a couple minuted to check them out.