I am a proud father of four fantastic children. Every day I get to hang out with my preteen daughter, gradeschooler, preschooler, and toddler. As you might expect my daughter and her three younger brothers attend the youth and children’s programs at my church. My wife and I want to stay informed about what’s going on with our kids at church. Elim Gospel Church’s Children’s Pastor, Rob Hagstrom, is doing a great job.
In the last week I’ve received three communications in my personal inbox because I am subscribed to his blog. On Monday I received a summary of what my gradeschooler has been learning all month. On Tuesday I received a post entitled ‘Understanding Your Toddler‘ and this morning I received one more informing me that there will be no kids program this Sunday night as well as information on upcoming kids ministry events, Sunday morning message topics, and Scripture memory verses. I am well informed.
I am pretty certain EGC’s communication to parents has never been better! Here’s the important part . . . IT’S REAL EASY TO DO AND IT’S FREE!
How You Can Enhance Communication With A Blog
I’d like to suggest several ways a simple blog can revolutionize how you communicate with your congregation, volunteers, and influencers. In a future post I will share some tactical tips on getting started with a free blog platform like WordPress or Blogger.
FOR THE CONGREGATION:
This section highlights some ideas on how the pastor can maximize communication to his congregation. Note: Some churches have a ‘church blog’ that includes several authors, not just the Lead Pastor.
- Recap the Sunday Morning Message
I have a surprise for you pastors. People don’t actually talk about your sermon all week long. In fact, you’re lucky if they remember the theme of your message by Sunday night. Sorry. The good news is that you can refresh their memory with your blog. Probably the best time to do this is on Sunday night or Monday morning (within 24 hours of your message).
- Communicate Big Events
Although I wouldn’t recommend you blog about every single event in the church, it can be very effective to blog about upcoming events that you want everyone in the church to get excited about with you.
- Share a Devotional
Let your congregation get extra input from you during the week, besides the weekend sermon. Share a brief word of encouragement during the week.
- Setup Your Message
You may want to occasionally encourage your congregation to ‘get ready’ for your upcoming message with a short story, Scripture, or quote.
- Get Personal
Your blog could be a great way for your congregation to stay current on various and interesting things going on in your life. For instance, if you just had a baby – post a pic!
- Highlight A Story, Person, or Current Event
People love stories – and they want to hear from the leaders in their lives. Use your blog to tell transformation stories from people in your blog. Or invite an elder to post a devotional thought or story as a guest blogger. Finally, link your readers to another blog, article, or news piece that you feel is relevant to them.
- Enhance a Sermon Series
At Elim Gospel Church we have occasionally utilized Pastor Josh Finley’s blog to emphasize a sermon series. For instance, in our “New Thru 30” series (we read the New Testament together in 30 days) we organized various church leaders to write an article and arranged them into the blog so that church members received an article every day for the 30 day series.
FOR VOLUNTEERS
This section highlights ideas on how a ministry director could utilize a blog to effectively inspire, instruct and inform volunteers in each one’s unique area of ministry. For example, your Greeter Ministry might create a blog for your greeters, cafe hosts, and ushers; or your Children’s Ministry might create a blog for the preschool and/or gradeschool volunteers.
- Inspire
Your volunteers will be most effective when they are inspired. Use your blog to motivate them towards fulfilling your church mission and vision by sharing stories, links, articles, etc. For example, this would be a great place to share a short devotion with the Worship Team about the ‘audience of One’ during worship.
- Inform
Everyone knows that confusion breeds anxiety; and lack of communication breeds confusion. There’s probably no better way to frustrate volunteers than to keep them in the dark about what they should know to be a success. Things like volunteer meetings, volunteer schedules and information about what they are supposed to do, when, and how are all extremely important. Additionally, your volunteers want to know about your new strategies and ideas before you implement them. A ministry blog is a perfect place to roll out any or all of those things.
- Instruct
Another way to create a frustrating environment for volunteers is by holding back on the pertinent training, resources, and procedures needed to be successful. Your ministry blog can help to facilitate this by providing links, articles, and information on how to do their job. For example, your could write a simple article for your Greeters one week entitled, “How To Greet Parents”. You could share three simple steps. Again, as an example: (1)”Offer assistance with doors and coats.” (2)”Greet the child(ren) first.” (3)”Greet the parent next.”
FOR MINISTRY INFLUENCERS
This final section highlights ideas on how you might utilize a blog to encourage unity among your members and leaders. For example, you might encourage all of your members to subscribe to this blog so that your leadership can effectively keep them informed about strategic plans designed to fulfill your church’s mission.
- Missional Momentum
Your blog is a great place to systematically reinforce your church’s mission. This can be done with key stories, exhortations, and short teachings that reinforce and remind your influencers of ‘Why We Do What We Do.”
- Values Reinforcement
Similarly, a leadership blog can be very effective in strengthening your church’s core values. For instance, if you have a core value of ‘integrity’ or ‘caring’ or ‘family-focused’ you can highlight that value on occasion with an example of what fulfilling that value might ‘look like’ or ‘sound like’ in the context of ministry in the church body.
- Culture Shifts
Most church leaders understand that culture shifts can be a long and tedious process. Your leadership blog can help to build or maintain momentum with culture oriented strategies. For example, let’s say you have been intentionally focusing on building a ‘guest friendly culture’ or a ‘prayer culture’ in your congregation. That won’t happen overnight; but it CAN happen over time and with consistent reminders from your influencers blog.
- Vision Casting & Strategic Roll-outs
You want your influencers to be informed and have time to process change and new initiatives. A well thought out blog series can play a big role in setting your leaders up for success as they have time to give their own input and feel part of the beginning stages of your vision. For example, you may be getting ready to start a new small group initiative. You could write several articles over the course of a few weeks to your influencers first letting them know the development of this vision and asking for input and feedback. The result will be greater buy-in and trust from your leaders.
- Feedback
Since this particular kind of blog is dedicated to your ministry leaders and influencers, it can be a great platform to get honest feedback without worry that guests or the community is privy to conversations that could perhaps be misunderstood. Posing a question in your blog and inviting comments or inserting a survey into your blog can be very effective and easy.
- Communication
Similar to Volunteer oriented blogs, your leadership blog can be a great tool to request or remind your influencers to do something or be somewhere. For instance, you might write a short blog the week before Easter requesting all influencers to remember three things on Sunday morning: (1)Greet 3 People You Don’t Know. (2)Show Up 10 Minutes Early. (3)Let Us Know Of Any Problems Right Away.
Comments
2 responses to “Build Momentum & Create Unity With A Blog”
Thanks for the plug and the encouragement! Let me just say to the readers that you have to be patient and intentional about being regular with your blog, but it’s worth it when your people have something reliable to follow.
Good point Rob. Blogging can be very effective, but you HAVE to stay consistent and intentional!