Church News at St. Faith’s – Part 1

This year we started producing weekly Church News segments for our Sunday Morning (family) and Night (young adults) services – the largest 2 of 5 at St. Faith’s. This is something that we’ve thought about doing for a while, but finally committed to doing.

Over the next couple of posts I’ll address why we’re doing church news and how.

Why we’re doing Church News

At St. Faith’s, our vision statement points us to who we want to be as a church to bring glory to God:

Our desire is to be: A community transformed by Jesus’ love, fully devoted to loving one another, and radically committed to impacting the world with Christ’s love.

From an up-the-front, service leader, perspective, it’s crucial that we communicate that vision effectively, and that we invite people to be part of it. As we’re continuing to develop Church News throughout the year (we haven’t figured everything out yet!), we’re continuing to find ways to express the church vision.

Here’s an example of a recent week’s Church News.

However, there’s a couple of reasons why we started doing it in the first place, which are at the heart of the process.

Being Intentional

During pre-production each month Ben, the pastor for our family and night congregations, will discuss with Nick, a volunteer who produces the script and directs the filming, what notices we want for the following month. This has meant that a particular focus has come on to planning ahead for events and as a result, the communication of these events is much more effective.

We’re able to tailor the script each week to give as little or as much information as we need to give at that time. This means that we can quickly promo (in 15 seconds or so) an event coming up at the end of the month in the first few weeks – to get it on people’s radar and in their diaries. Likewise, if there’s an event that’s big for the life of the church, we’re able to plan to give more time to it as a segment over several weeks, or in a single week.

As a result of the planning, we’re also able to make sure we’re communicating exactly what we need at the moment in time. We don’t distract from the segment with unnecessary ad-libbed anecdotes (which often will happen in a live situation), but get the important details out and communicate how the message relates to the vision of the church. The team at Church on the Move, where we drew a lot of inspiration from, call this ‘identifying the win’ – and I think we’re still trying to figure out what that means for us. However, I do believe it’s vitally important to do this to be clear and concise and hopefully get people motivated to live out the vision as members of the church.

Integrating New People

Each month we have someone different in front of the camera – and so far we’ve gone for a variety of people, a young worker, a parent from our family service and another, older, parent from our night service. In addition to the welcome from our pastoral team (who lead the congregation through our services) from the front of church, we wanted to connect new people with a face they might recognise after church. Because of this, we’re deliberate in having the person introduce themselves and give a bit of background on who they are. We’re also intentional, on the tail end, to encourage people to come back next week.

The video also serves as the entry point to invite people to visit the Next Steps page on our website. This is done as the first segment after of the welcome specifically for visitors to have the opportunity to connect with us via their smart phone during or after the service – if they don’t feel comfortable introducing them selves to a church regular or staff member.

Encouraging Regulars

Because we’re being more intentional with our notices, we’ve got a greater opportunity to encourage our regular church members. We’re able to give updates on things that are happening around church both in the past and future. As I wrote above, we’re also able to make sure everything we produce is on message, that is, communicating the vision of the church. I believe that, without a consistent message, we lose the effectiveness of notices which directly impacts the ability for our regulars to feel and be a part of the vision of the church.

In the next blog post, we’ll talk about the technical aspects of how we shoot, edit and distribute Church News every week.