For agents: This is the cornerstone YouTube script that installs the full 7 Building Blocks methodology in one ~30-minute video. It carries the IP load that lets visit episodes apply 2-3 Blocks without re-teaching the whole system. Status: launching shortly.
The Church Communications Masterclass
Someone at your church walks up to you after six weeks of announcements and says, “I didn’t even know that was happening!” You did everything right. You announced it from stage. Put it on the website. Posted it on social. Published it in the bulletin. And this person - who you know was there on Sunday - still claims they had no idea.
That sentence is the reason this video exists. And here’s the first thing I want to say: these things happen not because you’re not trying hard enough. It’s not your team’s fault. Church communications runs on one of two things. A system, or chaos. Almost no church has a system. Almost every church has the chaos. I went to school to be a pastor - degree in theology and youth ministry. You think we had a class on this? No. And here’s why this matters so much. Communications isn’t a department in your church. It’s the thing every department runs on. You preach sermons - that’s communications. You promote events - that’s communications. You invite people to small groups. You follow up with first-time visitors. You cast vision for giving. You recruit volunteers. Every single thing your church does to move someone from passive spectator to activate participant, from far from God to walking with Jesus, comes down to one question: can you communicate? If the answer is “not well,” it doesn’t just hurt your announcements. It hurts your discipleship, your outreach, your growth, your mission. So that’s what this video is. A complete system. Seven building blocks that eliminate the chaos in any church - whethere you’re fifty people or five thousand. Walk through them in order, install them, and the “I didn’t even know that was happening” goes away.
Now, one quick thing before we start. Everything I’m about to teach you works better if you know where your church actually is right now. We call this the Church Chaos Score. Zero to 100. Low score = healthy comms. High score = chaos is running the show. Here’s how to get your score. You paste in your church website and three YouTube links to recent full services. That’s it. Most churches already have services up on YouTube, so the whole submission takes about three minutes. If you don’t have full services on YouTube, no worries, you can also send us the audio files of full services. From there, we will analyze every announcement and every word said from stage looking at 38 different signals, and then send you a score and a breakdown of where you stand. churchchaos.com. Link in in the description, QR code on screen. Get your church’s chaos score. Submit it now - keep watching, you can do both. Knowing your score will make every step of this video more useful. Okay - let’s get into it.
So, in The 7 Building Blocks, the first three are the foundation. Without these, nothing else works. With them, everything else becomes a lot easier. Let’s start with Building Block number one. Assign Levels to Every Ministry. Think about it this way - even an average-sized church of about 85 people can easily have twelve or more distinct ministries or departments. Youth, Kids, Women’s, Men’s, Small Groups, Outreach, Worship, Prayer, Missions, Hospitality - I could go on. And here’s the part churches mess up - not everything deserves the same promotion. Maybe that sounds obvious to you. The thing is, this principle almost always gets ignored in church. That’s why building block number one is to assign levels to every ministry and event in your church - a level 1, 2, 3, or 4. And your level determines your promotional playbook. Not the volume of the ministry leader’s voice. Not who has the best relationship with the pastor. Not who asks first. The level. Here’s how the four levels work.
Level 1 - churchwide events that affect 80 percent or more of your congregation, plus bridge events designed to reach new people. Think Easter. Christmas. Fall Festival. VBS. A major service time change. These are the events that get the most resources, the most visibility, and the most promotional bandwidth across every channel your church has. But - and this is critical - you need to protect this level and actually enforce the boundaries. What do I mean by that? Well, just because an event or ministry is “open to the whole church” does not mean it belongs at Level 1. If the Park Cleanup only ever draws 20 percent of the congregation, it’s not a Level 1 event. Even if it technically could attract everyone.
Level 2 - core next steps. These are the critical opportunities that ideally every person in your church engages in at some point. Volunteering. Giving. Baptism. Small groups. Your intro class - whether you call it Growth Track, Next Steps, or something else. First impressions and new visitor connection. These aren’t one-time events. They’re ongoing rhythms. And they form the backbone of discipleship in church - which is why they get their own level.
Level 3 - next generation. Kids, youth, young adults. Now, you might be wondering why this gets its own level. It’s not based on attendance numbers or giving volume. It’s based on what next gen uniquely brings to a church. Research from the Fuller Institute’s Growing Young project found that - “Churches that make young people feel at home experience growth across all generations.” Not just among young people. Across all generations. Next gen is the only catalyst that has been proven to do this. They are a multiplier. For that reason, they gets their own level.
Finally, Level 4 - individual ministries, departments, groups, and events. Men’s Ministry. Women’s Ministry. Missions. Prayer Ministry. The Running Club Small Group. The Couples Date Night. The Food Bank Fundraiser. These are valuable. They matter. But, they can’t take precedent over the other levels. Priorities must exist. Why? Because chaos reigns when you treat Level 1 events like Level 4 and vice-versa. Now, how do you know this building block is installed? When no promotion gets planned without knowing its level first. When in meetings, you hear things like, “That’s a Level 4” because it’s become a part of the vocabulary in your church. Not as a way to dismiss anyone - but as a way to direct them to the right promotional playbook. Which we’ll get to. But first, on to building block number two: Publish Policy.
Now that you know what you have and where it sits, you need rules that everyone in your church can agree on - shared language. Because here’s what happens without written policy. Every promotional decision becomes personal. The pastor says no to a ministry leader and it hurts a relationship. Someone else says yes - just to avoid conflict - and the announcement list grows when it shouldn’t. Decisions get made based on who asks loudest, or most convincingly, not what actually matters most to the mission of the church. And the person managing communications? You?! You’re stuck in this unwinnable position. Responsible for everything. Empowered to decide nothing. Policy fixes this. And when the policy makes the decision, no one has to be the bad guy. So, here are the 6 rules of Church Communications Policy. These are the rules I recommend every church adopt. You can customize the language. But the principles are universal. Rule number one: Awareness is not interest.
The goal of any communication is not to inform. Don’t miss that, okay? The goal is not to “inform” someone. It’s to compel someone toward a next step. Action. Not awareness. If your announcement just tells people about something, but doesn’t motivate them to actually do something, that’s just noise. Rule number two: Sunday is not your savior. A stage announcement will not magically solve low attendance or engagement. And until this belief is dismantled in your church, you will struggle to install the solutions that actually work. In my experience, this tends to be the hardest belief to break. Because for decades, churches have operated as though a stage announcement is the only promotional tool. But it’s not. It’s one tool. We’ll talk about the others briefly and the ones that specifically make sense for each level of event. Rule number three: the more you announce, the less they listen. What does this mean? If you do seven announcements on a Sunday morning, the response from all seven combined will almost certainly be less than if you just did three. When everything is important, nothing is important. The rule here I like to recommend? Three or fewer announcements from the stage each week. That’s the standard. Rule number four: Inspiration over information. Facts and details do not move people. Stories do. This is not opinion - it’s brain science. A study published in the National Library of Medicine concluded that stories - and I’m quoting - “have the power to affect our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.” This is also Biblical. No less than 35 percent of Jesus’ teachings in the synoptic Gospels used story. If story was good enough for Jesus and sharing about The Kingdom of God, it’s good enough for our church announcements and sharing about work of The Church. And we’ll talk about exactly how to do this practically in Building Block 6.
Rule number five: One destination for every promo. Don’t scatter your next steps across multiple channels. “Call the church.” “Email the leader.” “Talk to the pastor.” “Download the app.” “Check the bulletin.” Five different directions. Zero clarity. Send every promo to one consistent destination. Every time. The same one. We’ll build that destination in Building Block 7. Rule number six: Values dictate voice. How you communicate matters as much as what you communicate. I always say: the language you use, becomes the culture you build. What this means is that the words you choose are not incidental. The power of the tongue is a Biblical principle - that isn’t reserved just for interpersonal relationships, but the church you’re building as well. Practically speaking, your voice should be anchored in your church’s core values and DNA - not whatever the person on stage feels like saying that morning. So for example, if your church values warmth and hospitality, your communications should sound warm and hospitable. Across every channel. All the time.
And all together, those are the six rules for church communications. Now, here’s how to make this stick. Install this policy in your church along with the ministry levels for each event and department. Not in someone’s head. In writing. Circulate it. Make sure every ministry leader in your church has seen it. This is your shared language. So when someone asks, “Why didn’t my event get announced from stage?” you don’t have to say, “Because I said so.” You can say, “Because it’s a Level 4 event, and our policy directs Level 4 promotions through a different playbook.” Again, what those playbooks look like are coming soon in this video. But now, it’s the policy makig the decision. Not you. And let me give you a model to follow here. Because you don’t have to be a jerk about this. Christ Community Church enforces firm policy - but with good humor. For example, their comms team doesn’t accept project requests via, and I’m quoting their policy now, “carrier pigeons, smoke signals, or hallway conversations.” It’s firm. But it’s fun. And that’s what makes it work. Because the best policies are the ones people actually follow. And people tend to follow policies that don’t make them feel small.
Alright. That’s Building Blocks 1 and 2. Levels and Policy. The organizational backbone. Now, let’s get ahead of this, here’s the tension that’s going to surface as soon as you install these first two. And you need to be ready for it. Okay? Building Block 3: Give Each Ministry a Home. As soon as you install Levels and Policy, your Level 4 ministry leaders are going to feel something. They’ll understand the system intellectually. They’ll maybe even agree with it in principle. But they probably won’t love it. Why? Because they’ll feel like their ministry’s value and access just got downgraded. And honestly - they’re right to feel that way. Because without an alternative, every ministry depends on Sunday announcements for visibility. We need a fix. And that fix is to give every ministry its own home. Its own real estate on your church’s website. Not a page. That’s not enough. A space they can control. Where they can publish updates, promote events, share stories, and connect directly with the church and the people in their ministry individually - without coming to you every single week pleading for a stage announcement. Because…when every ministry has somewhere to send people, the pressure on stage time and announcements drops. So, here’s how this works practically. I said you don’t want to just give each ministry a page, right? So, what are we giving them? Well, think about how you follow accounts on social media. You don’t follow every account - you follow the ones that matter to you, and when they post, it shows up in your feed. You opted in. You chose to see it. Functionally, that is how a Post Collection works on your church’s website. Each ministry gets one. It works just like a profile page on social - except it lives on your church’s website, so it’s real estate your ministry leaders own. People can subscribe. The ministry posts updates. Subscribers can get notified when something new drops. Same mechanic as social, but instead of fighting an algorithm to reach the people who follow you, you actually get to reach them. Outreach gets a Post Collection. Women’s Ministry gets one. Men’s Ministry gets one. Youth gets one. Every ministry has its own home, its own audience, its own publishing channel.
Why does this work? A few reasons. First, it gives each ministry autonomy. Their own home. Their own messaging platform. Their own audience. They’re not dependent on the main stage anymore - they have something that belongs to them. Now, does that mean Level 4 ministries have zero access to churchwide promotions like stage announcemets? No. Critically, we’re not relegating Level 4 ministries to just the website. Not at all. We’ll get there. But this is our foundation. We need these three building blocks first: Assign Levels to Every Ministry, Publish Policy, and Give Each Ministry A Home. Post Collections are the unlock for making this work. Because we’re not just trying to take stuff away from ministries. We want to give them something that actually works and demystify their false belief that a stage announcement will save everything - remember, Sunday Is Not Your Savior. Now, quick acknowledgment before we keep going. If you’re thinking at all: “okay, this makes sense, but this will take some work to setup.” You’re right. We’ll come back to that at the end. For now, just stay with me - see the whole system, then we’ll talk about how to actually install it without you going crazy. Right now we’re three building blocks down, four to go. Building Blocks 4 through 7? These are what make the system go week after week, month after month, without you having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Which is the secret here - yes, implementing a new system will require some effort on the front-end, but once it’s installed? You recover so much of your precious time, energy, and sanity. It begins with Building Block 4: Supply Promotions Playbooks.
Once your church has levels, policy, and a home for every ministry - you need to actually promote things. This is where churches go wrong. Not because they’re not trying. But without a system, you’re always reacting. Always troubleshooting symptoms. Never addressing root causes. A Promotions Playbook removes the guesswork. So when a Level 1 event is coming up, everyone already knows the playbook - what channels, what timing, what to say. When a ministry asks “how will my event be promoted?” you hand them the playbook for their level. No debate. No negotiation. And inside of every playbook are three types of promotions you need to know: first up, Sprinkle Promotions. In a sprinkle promo, you lead with something valuable - a story, a teaching moment, an inspiring update, something humorous or entertaining - and sprinkle the promotion at the end. The great thing about Sprinkle Promos? You can use these as often as you want. Daily, even. Next, Sprint Promotions. These are reserved for Level 1 events only. Two to four times per year, maximum. This is the urgency phase at the end of a campaign - every channel, every day, promo-promo-promo, but for one week only. Easter gets one. Christmas gets one. Maybe your fall outreach. That’s it. Use Sprint Promos too often and people tune will out permanently. That’s why they’re called sprints - you can’t sprint forever. Finally, Smuggle Promotions, these are the clever ones. A Level 4 event - say, the Park Clean-Up - doesn’t qualify for a stage announcement. But volunteering does, that’s Level 2 - a core next step. So a Smuggle Promo looks like this - you want to do a stage announcement about volunteering, and you decide to use the Park Clean-Up as your example. “One way you can serve our community this month is our Park Clean-Up - here’s how one family got involved last year.” The promotion is for volunteering. The example is the Park Clean-Up. Level 2 cosigns for Level 4.
Now, here’s what a playbook actually looks like in practice. For a Level 1 event like Christmas, the playbook starts eight weeks out. It starts with an Awareness phase, then transitions into an Interest phase, in both of these phases you’re heavy on the Sprinkle Promos. In the final week, the seven-day countdown before the event, that’s when we enter the Sprint Promotion phase and we go all out. There’s a different playbook for each of Levels 2, 3, and 4. Rather than walk through all four on camera, here’s the deal - when you receive your Church Chaos Score at churchchaos.com, you’ll be able to optin to a free communications makeover whre can you get all four playbooks. For free.
Onto - Building Block 5: Create the Weekly Bulletin. Now, this is not the version of the bulletin you’re thinking from your childhood if you’re my age. What we want though is the essence of what made the bulletin useful, but, translated and upgraded for the communication era we live in now. Said differently, what is the purpose of the bulletin? It is the backstop. The record-of-truth. The exhaustive list of everything happening at your church each week. And it ties the entire system together. How so? Well, here’s the tension this building block solves. Level 4 ministries deserve visibility. But they don’t always belong in weekly announcements from the stage. Without a solution, you’re stuck choosing between two bad options. Option 1: give them announcement time, and announcements start to drag, the congregation tunes out, and the system breaks. Option 2: say no, and frustrate the ministry leader. The Weekly Bulletin is option 3. And it’s the one that actually works.
Here’s how: The Weekly Bulletin is hosted as a Post Collection on your website. Each new weekly edition breaks down every church event day by day. What’s happening, where, when, and how to get involved. Featured sections with full-width visuals for events that need emphasis. And an “Upcoming” section at the bottom for future events not happening this week but worth knowing about. Every item links out to the relevant ministry’s Post or event page. The bulletin gets in front of people three ways. First - a permanent link in what we call The Launcher. This is a small widget that lives on every page of your church’s website and surfaces your most important next steps. This is a free widget that we created and support, more than 17,000 churches use it, and I’d recommend dedicating a permanent action in your Launcher to the bulletin - maybe even putting it at the top. You don’t have to use our software if you have something similar on your site, the principle is what matters: one consistent place on your website where the bulletin always lives. Second - a pre-service slide with a QR code that runs every Sunday before service begins. People walk in, see the slide, scan the code, and they’ve got the full rundown. Third - sent weekly via email to every subscriber on the church’s email list. Why does this matter? Because now, every event in your church - even the men’s breakfast, even the Park Clean-Up, even the Saturday morning running club - gets surfaced in the bulletin. And the bulletin goes to the entire church. So even though the men’s breakfast doesn’t get a stage announcement every week, it does still get churchwide visibility every week. Through the bulletin. Through the pre-service slide. Through the email. The system works for everyone. Every level. Every ministry. And here’s how you know this building block is working: anyone - staff, volunteer, or congregation member - can answer the question “What’s happening at church this week?” without calling the church office. That’s the test. When your bulletin becomes the default answer to that question, you’ve installed it correctly. Which brings us to, Building Block 6: Commit to The Church Announcements Formula. This is the single most important habit change you’ll make. The formula is simple. 1 Story plus 1 Next Step. That’s it. Every announcement from stage follows this formula. One story to inspire. One next step to act. Not a five-minute logistics dump. Not a list of dates and times and locations and what to bring. One story. One next step. Why story? Because storytelling is the only type of communication that actually forces the human brain to focus and pay attention. We spend up to a third of our waking hours in a daydreaming state. We’re on autopilot. And story is the thing that snaps us out of it. When you hear a story - a real, human story - your brain locks in. Your attention narrows. You start listening. And it’s Biblical. Back to Robert Stein’s research showing that no less than 35 percent of Jesus’ teachings in the synoptic Gospels used story. Parables. Illustrations. Narratives that made abstract truth concrete and personal. If story was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for our church announcements.
Here’s what this looks like practically. Let’s say you’re promoting baptism. The old way: “Baptisms are coming up on July 19th. If you’d like to be baptized, go to our website and fill out the form. The deadline is July 15th.” That’s information. It’s accurate. But it moves almost nobody. Why? Because awareness is not interest. The new way? Focus on a story about baptism - here’s me doing that from stage:
The logistics - the dates, the deadlines, the what-to-bring - all of that lives on the website. On the Post. In the bulletin. The stage is not for logistics. The stage is for inspiration. Because inspiration is what moves people to act. Information is what helps them follow through after they’ve already decided to act. Now, as previously mentioned, here’s the rule for services: three or fewer announcements from stage. And only Levels 1, 2, and 3 have access to stage announcements in our playbooks. That’s it. Protect this platform. Because what happens when you do five, six, or more announcements on a Sunday morning? I call this The Announcement Avalanche. You sit down. Someone gets on stage and starts running through a list. Announcement one - okay, you’re tracking. Announcement two - still with you. Announcement three - sure. Four, five, six - you’ve checked out. You don’t even remember what the second announcement was about anymore. When everything is emphasized, nothing feels important. Response rates go down, not up. The more you announce, the less they listen. And if your announcement time stretches to 10 or 15 minutes, you’re not just losing attention for the promos - you’re degrading the quality of the entire service experience.
Now, there’s one more piece to this building block that’s just as important as the formula itself. The next step script that gets used every single time, for every announcement, every week. Here’s a formula you can use: “Head to [your website] or scan the QR code on the back of the [color] card that says Connect.” Feel free to augment. Adjust. But, once you’ve landed on something. Stick to the same script. Every promo. Every week. Same words. Same destination. Every single time. Why? Because the language you use becomes the culture you build. Through simple repetition - week after week, month after month - your congregation learns exactly where to go to find information and take their next steps. Always. Without being reminded. Without being spoon-fed. Without ever having to ask, “Where do I go?” Because they already know. You trained them.
Finally, Building Block 7: Launch Your Central Hub. This is the destination. The one place every single promo in your church points to. This is where the next step script sends people. This is the thing your congregation gets trained on. This is the final building block. Right now, your church likely sends people to a few different places, right? The app for one thing. The website for another. A Google Form for this. A sign-up sheet for that. Talk to the pastor for something else. “Fill out the Next Steps card in the seat back.” “Go to the foyer table.” “Register on the website.” “Email the prayer team.” Six different destinations. No consistency. Three rules for your Central Hub. All three are required - miss one and the whole thing can break down. One: it has to be available 24/7. Sunday service is one hour out of 168 in your week. Someone sitting on their couch Tuesday night, inspired by a Sprinkle promotion for small groups that they just saw on social, needs to be able to take that step right then. Not when the office reopens. Not when they next show up at church. Right then. Two: it has to work on every device. Phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. No app downloads required. The moment you require a download, you’ve added a friction point most people won’t cross. Three: it has to capture, store, and distribute information. Sign-ups, registrations, prayer requests, contact forms, RSVPs. Whatever tool you use, those three things are the bar. Now here’s the psychology behind why consolidation works. And this is backed by research, not intuition. The famous jam study - Iyengar and Lepper. Shoppers at a grocery store were presented with a display of jam. One group saw 24 varieties. Another group saw 6. The group that saw 24 varieties drew more people to the table - more browsing. But the group that saw only 6 varieties was 10 times more likely to actually buy a jar of jam. Ten times. More options, less action. Whirlpool tested emails with multiple links versus just one. The single link email generated 42 percent more clicks. Neil Patel found that reducing form fields from 4 to 3 boosted conversions by 26 percent. ImageScape found that reducing form fields from 11 to 3 produced a 160 percent increase in submissions.
The principle is clear. Fewer options lead to more action. And simply by consolidating every connection point in your church into a single destination, you will see an increase in next steps and engagement. You don’t need to make things more complicated. You need to make them simpler.
What about proof in churches? Forefront Church installed a Central Hub and watched their digital connections go from 15 percent of Sunday attendees to 31 percent. Small group engagement went from 42 percent to 74 percent. Their fall outreach attendance went from 400 to 900 people. But here’s what I want you to understand. The most important thing about the Central Hub is not the technology. It’s not the website. It’s not the tool. It’s the language. Establish your next step script. Say it every single time. And over months - not days, not weeks, months - you build a culture where your congregation knows exactly where to go. Without being asked. Without being reminded. Without ever having to say those words that started this whole video: “I didn’t even know that was happening.” And that’s the system. Seven building blocks. Levels. Policy. A Home for every ministry. Promotions Playbooks. The Weekly Bulletin. The Church Announcements Formula. And your Central Hub. Install them in order. Enforce them with consistency. And the chaos goes away. I promise.
With that being said, here’s the truth. It’s easy to watch this video, agree with the methodology and never install it. Why? Because the up-front work is real. So here’s the offer I’ll make to you and your church - my team will build it for you. Free. The levels. The policy. Your Post Collections for every ministry. The Promotions Playbooks. Your Weekly Bulletin. Your Central Hub. All seven building blocks. A free communications makeover. We did over a thousand of these last year. We’d love to do one for your church. The way to start is to get your Chaos Score. churchchaos.com. Next steps will follow. You can learn more about the free communications makeover and see if it’s a good fit. Until then, thank you for your time, attention, and trust - talk to you soon.