A Fresh Theme for Church Publicists

What’s worth promoting in your church? A strawberry festival, a revival meeting, an attendance contest, a social-action project?

Think again. The church wins more people through its educational program than any other way. Why not then give priority to publicizing the church’s learning opportunities?

Churches are beginning to capitalize on today’s growing interest in adult education. There is a great new thirst for instruction in everything from cake decorating to taxidermy. Surely this extends to such fields as theology, philosophy, church history, and the Bible. Churches are starting to offer “electives” in these subjects and they should promote them.

Offering such instruction is not merely a gimmick to add more names to the church rolls. The educational route is the soundest way to win people to Christ and to the church. Congregations have all too many hangers-on who were brought in through short-cut methods and who add little to church vitality.

How can a church begin an aggressive outreach with emphasis on education? Good publicity technique is a must. Once a church publicist is chosen, he should concentrate first on developing an effective internal information program. The people closest to the life of the church ought to know more than anyone else about what’s going on.

To be specific: Get all you can out of the venerable Sunday church bulletin. No one has come up with a better medium for keeping congregations abreast of activities. The bulletin should be attractive but not gaudy, interesting but not corny, and instructive but not sermonic. If you can’t do another thing publicity-wise, publish a good bulletin to be distributed at Sunday services.

Ideally, the bulletin should be supplemented by a church newsletter with content that is helpful in itself in addition to being promotional. It should be mailed weekly or monthly. Second-class permits that assure speedy delivery of timely material are available to churches for the mailing of such regularly issued printed publications at only a fraction of a cent each.

Developments in the offset process have brought individualized printed materials within the financial range of virtually every congregation. The U. S. and Canadian post offices recognize offset as printing acceptable for second-class mailing (mimeographed material must go via the slower bulk route, or by expensive first-class). Zip-coding and pre-sorting are required in all but first class. Commercial typesetting for offset can be very expensive. You can get the next best thing by purchasing an IBM or other electric typewriter with carbon ribbon. The IBM “Selectric” is an especially good investment because it offers readily interchangeable type faces at relatively low cost. It can be put to a wide variety of uses in the church.

Every church should maintain a “clean” mailing list of fringe people and prospects as well as members. Keep the list several times as large as the church membership roster. Addressing of mailings can be done in several ways. The most inexpensive is to purchase a quantity of labels at a stationery store and recruit a typist. Sophisticated machinery can be acquired to do the same task when the list is large.

Brochures, flyers, and the like are particularly good means of promoting church educational programs. Avoid the temptation to try for fancy, colorful designs. Focus upon facts, as many as possible, of what your church has to offer educationally. Present them clearly and interestingly. Light touches with candor go over better in today’s world than flatulent puffery and tricks. Among older people it is still necessary to refute the notion that Sunday school is only for kids.

Among other internal promotional tools are calendars, posters, telephone campaigns, exhibits, visitation, post cards, and letters. Souvenir literature packets ought to be given to first-time visitors. Bulletin boards and contests may be outliving their usefulness; the former invariably look sloppy and the latter appeal to the wrong motives.

So much for internal publicity. The amateur church publicist can pick up a wealth of helpful data in Ralph Stoody’s Handbook of Church Public Relations. And many church publicists never really need to go beyond the internal stage. There is much spillover so that outsiders are reached through what are primarily internal efforts—a fact that should be kept in mind when determining content.

External publicity programs can, of course, do a lot more for the church. But they require more technical know-how if financial waste is to be avoided. The main tools include secular newspaper advertising, radio, and television, and all these entail great expense, especially in large cities. In smaller towns, churches can expect occasional free news stories and pictures in the local media, but these will not contribute greatly to long-range growth.

Desperately needed these days are new approaches and new ideas on how local congregations can publicize themselves among the unchurched. So many skillfully worked-out advertising campaigns are competing for attention that individual churches can hardly get into the ball park. All the big denominations have publicity bureaus, and pastors should seek counsel and cooperation from them. But the United Church of Christ is currently the only one that is sponsoring any significant advertising campaigns with local-church tie-ins. Methodists have a thirteen-minute motivating film available; it is entitled As Others See Us.

Educational programs, if properly promoted, may provide a breakthrough in reaching outsiders. Aggressive churches eager to avail themselves of the benefits of modern media should be encouraged, but only if there is a thorough understanding of the field. Start by reading Edward L. Greif’s The Silent Pulpit: A Guide to Church Public Relations.

The wise local church doesn’t try to take on too much but does its best to carry out smaller plans effectively. A comparatively inexpensive idea for any church would be to duplicate a flyer on “Where to Get Help.” This would tell how to contact police and fire departments, hospitals, sources of legal aid, power, water, and sewage companies, government officials, and other community problem-solvers. On the reverse side a modest offer of spiritual help could be made—including a listing of study courses available at the church.

Much more church promotion needs to be based on evangelism. This is a long-term process that makes every churchman a “publicist.” Howard Weeks, a Seventh-day Adventist, has handled the subject well in his comprehensive work Breakthrough—A Public Relations Guidebook for Your Church. “We do not move in and cut down the community tree in order to pluck such fruit as happens to be ripe for plucking,” he says. “We cultivate, nurture, take what matures, then go on cultivating and nurturing, looking toward future returns indefinitely, until the Lord one day lets the church know its work is finished.”

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