Over the past several months we've been making some substantial changes in the way we communicate as a church. Last summer we did a fairly extensive review of all the media we were using and the effectiveness of each medium. What we discovered was fairly concerning. We felt like we had been communicating effectively, but people kept telling us they didn't know about upcoming events and hadn't heard about something that happened at the church. While we had been communicating people obviously hadn't been listening. More accurately though they had tuned us out.
A few years ago we made a major shift in our worship planning to move
towards a single big idea for each weekend. That idea often carries
into the ministry we do with children, youth, and small groups in the
church. We've seen a dramatic impact to focusing our message during worship. This same focus was needed in all of our communication.
Ultimately communicating is less about how we share information and more about how well people receive it. We took time to look at each tool we were using to communicate with people in the church. The evaluation covered the source material, final output, and measured the how well the message was received.
Over the next week I'll be posting detailed information about the prior way we were communicating, the results of our evaluation, and the changes that are taking place at Schweitzer.