Your church does not have a communication problem

The symptom is not the problem

One of the most common things I hear from churches is this:

“People don’t know what’s going on.”

And almost immediately, the conversation turns to tools.

Maybe we need a better newsletter. Maybe we need an app. Maybe the website needs a redesign. Maybe we need better screens in the foyer. Maybe we just need to post more.

But more often than not, the tool isn’t actually the problem.

The real problem is that nobody has clearly decided what the congregation most needs to hear.

So everything becomes important. Every ministry wants its announcement made. Every event gets pushed. Every platform gets filled. And eventually the congregation learns that if everything is important, nothing really is.

Attention is something we steward

We talk a lot in church about stewarding money, time, people and resources.

I think we also need to learn to steward attention.

Your congregation only has so much of it to give you.

Every WhatsApp message, stage announcement, email, slide and social post asks them to spend a little of that attention. If we constantly ask them to notice ten or twelve things at once, we shouldn’t be surprised when they remember none of them.

Sometimes better communication actually means communicating less.

One of the disciplines I encourage churches to consider is a simple one: choose the two or three things the whole church genuinely needs to know this week.

Everything else can still be communicated — just to the people who actually need to hear it.

Decide before you design

Before changing the website, building a new template or signing up for another platform, I’d ask four questions:

1. What is the most important thing we want the whole church to know right now? 2. Who actually needs to know each of the other things? 3. Where is the one reliable place people can go when they need information? 4. What happens to something that doesn’t make the communication cut?

That last question matters more than it sounds.

Because unless there is permission to say, “No, this doesn’t need to go to everyone,” every communication system eventually becomes cluttered again.

Then the technology gets easier

Once those decisions are clear, the technology part becomes surprisingly simple.

You need one place where information is accurate and current. You need a communication rhythm people can learn to trust. And you need ways to speak to smaller groups without broadcasting everything to everybody.

That’s a much smaller problem than, “We need a whole new communications strategy.”

And I think churches often solve it in the wrong order.

**Clarity first. Then design. Then platforms.**

Start with the platform and you can end up with a beautiful new system that communicates exactly the same confusion as the old one.