Stop Doing Church Announcements and Start Inspiring Mission Engagement
If you haven’t noticed, the announcements part of the church worship gathering is broken. It doesn’t work.
Why?
The bullet list of announcements is invariably too long.
It's when many check out and check their phones.
The less skilled communicators on the team often end up doing it.
It is redundant to other sources of information.
It sounds like a brainstormed list that anyone and everyone can add to.
It is not prioritized into what matters most.
This is why most announcements slots fail to do their job.
To engage people in the church you can harness the intent of the "announcements" time and figure out how to refocus it on the mission critical action steps that you want to convince the Body of Christ to engage in right now.
If that description doesn't apply to what you're doing announcements about then why are you doing them in the first place? It takes focus and determination to look at it this way—and it takes courage to say no to other things, but it is worth it for the kingdom results gained.
Here’s how to start inspiring mission engagement in six steps:
1) Importance - Make the Call On What is Most Important
Decide the #1 thing this week (or month) that is of utmost importance and communicate no more than this. This sounds ruthless, but I'm telling you that you must drill into your mind that the weekend gathering is important enough and the mission is important enough that if you can't narrow it down to one thing per week then you're distracting from the one thing you want everyone to do.
Any church member could get up and give a long list of announcements. Frankly, you could just run a powerpoint scroll of slides with music instead (which, of course, you may already do before the gathering anyway.) But church leaders lead, and this is what leadership looks like. Everything but the one big thing should be in print, online, on an app, or achieved with signage.
This decision changes the way everyone in the church will see the announcements time forever. You might begin to do the announcements right at the end of the sermon, or between two songs, or right before the sermon. The lead pastor might want to be one communicating these things anyway. If they are as important as they are, then position them as critical, not incidental. It’s not preamble, postlude, or intermission. If what you're saying is incidental, then why waste your time, and theirs? It’s quite possible that if you do it right, then it is the most important part of the gathering.
This first part is the biggest, so I talked more about this than the rest below. If you do this, the others below are possible and even simple. If you don't do this, the other ones don't matter. So, click away now if this level of focus doesn't seem possible for you.
2) Introduction - Start Out Right
Gain attention through humor, video, or relevance to current events in culture. If done within or after a sermon, then it should also connect as the vital application of the sermon itself. You may already be creative with your announcements—but you'll get a better bang for your creativity buck if you've already decided to communicate what's important only.
3) Inspiration - Communicate the Big Why
Communicate the heart-level reason why this is not only relevant to their spiritual life but also the mission and vision of the church. This has the added benefit of reinforcing the vision every week. The most effective visionary Pastors in churches of all sizes not only "preach the announcements" but go a step further: they begin to see that their sermon is just one of the tools God is using to mobilize the body of Christ for mission activity, so inspiration becomes organic.
4) Information - Give them Only the Essential Details
Get the core information into their hands, and reinforce it visually on the screen or with other simultaneous and subsequent communication tools and point to where they can get their further questions answered. Less is more here. Once the hook is set they will follow up to get more information. Just get them started—don’t make it a FAQ session.
5) Action - Focus on the Next Thing to Do
Tell them the ONE THING you want them to do now about this one most important thing you took the time to focus on. Remove conjunctive words like "or," "and," "also," from your church engagement communication. Get it down to the one thing you want them to do. The point of this is not to communicate options (that comes latter in follow up) but to get to their one action step they really barely need to write down or put in their phones because it is so memorable and portable. After this is said with clarity 90% of the room should be able to turn to the person next to them and tell them what they are supposed to do.
6) Celebrate - Reinforce it Next Week
If it was important enough to tell them do on this Sunday, it is important enough to celebrate next Sunday. Did you ask everyone to invite one person to an event on Friday? Next Sunday you should celebrate how many did that. Did you ask everyone to sign up for a small group? That number is a great one to celebrate. Did you ask them to come forward and respond to a call to Baptism? (If that's not something you want to celebrate the next week then check your pulse, my friend.)
When you celebrate engagement, the church is compelled to engage even more and the people start to take your mission-driven communication (announcements) seriously. If you celebrate well, it will only take 6 weeks or less to change the culture in your church. It adds fuel to your communication fire.
The result: Church Mission Engagement
If you want to move past mere attendance, and you really want engagement, then I'd suggest you stop doing announcements and start inspiring people toward what is most important to the mission.
I don't often do this but there's part of this challenge to "Stop Doing Church Announcements and Start Inspiring Mission Engagement" that is difficult for many pastors early in trying to do this and I couldn't fit it into the article so I offer it here. Many church leaders find that a church used to a long laundry list of announcements REALLY struggles in the early months and years when this gets trimmed down to the one big thing each week. Here are some tips:
1) Own the decision: say "We make the decision on what the one main thing that we want to communicate is on this day each week/month and I lead that meeting, and we come to an agreement on the decision."
2) Include a deadline in your response to questions. "We review all possible mission critical communication on this and that date each week/month. If you'd like to submit that please email me the info or text me." Many people will come up to you RIGHT BEFORE THE services sometimes to try and work in an announcement. Why do they do this? because it used to work at your church. It's not their fault--they were trained to think it works. Train them out of it.
3) Make sure you have MANY other options for communication. In print. Online. On screens. With signage, etc. Emphasize to people that all the mission critical stuff is communicated in all those ways FIRST and if something is communicate in all those ways and ALSO needs platform communication then the leaders of the church will consider it. Many want to SKIP ALL THOSE HARD STEPS in communicating and just say: "The pastor should say this from the pulpit and everyone will do it then and I don't need to do that work" That's just lazy. (Don't say that last part out loud--use your internal voice to say they are being lazy and just point them to the robust options for communicating.)
4) Be consistent--if you break your "one thing" rule more than 2 times a year then it will all start flooding in.
5) The way around this is during the sermon... the preacher can take a minute in a sermon as an application or celebration related to a point to emphasize something that's not the main thing--so use your judgement in this and "take your time away not time from the rest of the service." Obviously this can be overkill--but you can control it better in the message than in the rest of the gathering.
Hope this helps.
Good stuff Dave. I posted it on our District's FB page.