I have been thinking a lot recently about the three topics of communication, information and advertising and looking at how well or how badly we do as the church.
I suppose this started not long before Christmas when I came across, by accident the 'Not Ashamed' project and started to wonder why no one at church or in our circuit seemed to have picked this up and told us about it (communication) why we didn't know about it (information) and how well it was publicised (advertising).
The second thing was the Biblefresh project which is taking place this year and while this may have reached a few more churches it still seems to me that there are lots of churches that know nothing about it.Certainly in our circuit it appeared that our church was the only one who had any information on the project. I was preaching at a Baptist church on Sunday gone and mentioned Biblefresh and they said they had no knowledge of the project.
The third thing was the new Methodist hymn book 'Singing the faith'. I find it quite incredible that at least one of the churches in our circuit didn't discuss it at their church council and that's only one I know about. I heard from one of our members that a relative of hers who is a local preacher in another part of the country didn't even know that we were looking at having a new hymn book. How well has this been communicated and how well has it been advertised?
The fourth thing I picked up on Methodist Preachers blog when he raised questions about the website of the Methodist Church Connexion and the news pages that each district can use to publicise and advertise events. Apparently there was nothing on there at all - the cupboard was bare so to speak.
How well are we getting the message of the things detailed above to our folk and if we are doing badly with this how are we doing with communicating the gospel?
Some interesting things to consider and think about - not sure what the answers are but look forward to any thoughts or comments my readers might have.
1 comment:
We have had discussions over this in our district. At our last synod, our training officer handed out a form for people to write down what was said and then the name of the person in church and circuit who it was thought was best to communicate. A valiant effort I am sure, but synod is loaded with business and I don't know how well it work.
I think a lot of it comes down to interest. I am hugely in favour of Biblefresh, so I have been promoting it a lot. The new hymnal I think is a bad idea through and through, so it gets little to no attention from me.
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