Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

My heart breaks a bit every time I hear that a communications position is cut in our church. Sharing our faith through stories is an ancient - and proven - evangelism tool. How can people not value the role of telling our stories not only to ourselves but also to the wider communities in which we live and worship?

A recent ‘aha’ moment helped me to see what I had been missing.

At a communications retreat this spring, a priest shared: “I never thought about [congregational] communications as sharing our stories. I always think of it as sharing information.” Her comment opened my eyes: I’d assumed people understood communications to include sharing our stories. I was wrong.

Does her statement reflect your thinking about parish communications? Or perhaps your budget committee's? Each time I share this story I get the same reaction: a slight nod of the head and a smile of recognition.

My mission since the retreat? To be more specific with congregational leaders when talking about communications, emphasizing the value of sharing our stories in addition to providing information. 

I learned recently of two congregations and a diocese who have taken steps to share stories instead of primarily providing information:

• My new favorite source of congregational stories is Karin Hamilton’s new blog ctepiscopalpearl (Diocese of Connecticut). Like ECF Vital Practices, ctepiscopalpearls seeks out and shares congregations’ “unique ways of doing routine work, fun stuff, and inspiring stories“ which for me provides a sense of the values and personality of a congregation that makes me want to learn more. 
• Through ctepiscopalpearls, I learned Trinity Church in Hartford has named its first Associate for Digital Ministries. Social media, as with any other communications activity, is more effective when it is part of an overall communications strategy. Funded by re-allocating money designated for newspaper advertising and other electronic communication, this part time staff position involves coordinating all aspects of Trinity’s (newly revised) website as well as their Facebook account, weekly and special email communication, and working with staff and with the parish’s information technology committee. I plan to follow Trinity on Facebook to watch how they develop this strategy.
• Two parishioners from St. Andrew the Apostle Episcopal Church in Encinitas, Calif. attended the 2013 Episcopal Communicators conference in San Diego. They report that during the conference they “were shown a completely different way of looking at communication while at the conference, it opened our eyes. So on returning to the office we established a communications task force that meets monthly. “ At a staff meeting they reorganized the work flow, freeing one staff member to focus on communications.  Guidelines have been developed and distributed. The homepage on the parish website was updated to reflect their new approach. The result? “Our "voice" is now much more uniform and we are making all our documents much more consistent. It is evident to us that this cannot happen overnight but will be a gradual process. The June/July edition of our newsletter, which is on our website is now much more stories and we use other means of communication to get the word out on what is going to happen.“