Less Clutter. Less Noise.

This week's recommended book is one on churches getting the message out, by Kem Meyer, communications director at Granger Community Church.

I marked pages to come back to in prayer, pages to discuss with my fellow staff members, pages to share with various volunteers, etc. I want to evaluate our weekend programs; I’ve long sensed that they are an effective communication vehicle for a very small percentage of our attendees, and the cost/benefit seems weighted heavily on the cost side, in terms of money and time (mine and others’). The book steered me to this great blog post by Tim Schraeder, communications director at Park Community Church in Chicago about their assassination of their weekly bulletin.

Meyer’s book has made me much more aware of the information overload our families are dealing with (especially pp. 122-123), the death of print media (even our own) as an effective form of communication, and the counter-productive ways most churches communicate (one of the memorable phrases: “reach fewer people more times”). And it was a timely read as we’re looking over a redesign of our website. And the “back of the book” stuff was very helpful.