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Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I know this sounds like some homespun advice from your mom, but it does apply to looking for resources on the internet to improve the weekend services or announcements at your church.
A quick search online will reveal an endless amount of templates and done-for-you resources that you can simply plug and play into your services; however, if you’re looking to improve your announcements, copying materials from someone else’s church is not the way to go about improving your church.
It’s Time to Think Carefully about This Important Part of Your Weekend Services
Rather than trying to take the easy way out and copying what somebody else has written, you need to find a way to improve this aspect of your service systematically by training your people and motivating them toward a better approach.
Now, it’s understandable that you might want to simply copy and paste announcements. In fact, there could be multiple reasons why you would be tempted to take this shortcut.
- You simply can’t stand this part of your weekend services. It brings a hassle to you every time it happens.
- You’re frankly not sure what to say this weekend, and although you know that announcements should be done, you aren’t sure how to leverage them to move people toward engagement.
- You might even be unsure of why you do this aspect of what you do every weekend.
As you look to improve your announcements, let’s talk more in-depth about why copying and pasting an announcement script from a website is a terrible idea for your church.
Best Practices Versus Blind Copying
Studying other churches is a good thing to do. Finding leading churches that are five steps ahead in various aspects is a great way for your church to level up its development and skip stages that could be holding it back as you attempt to reach more people.
Here at unSeminary, we do this through our weekly podcast. For nearly 600 episodes, we’ve interviewed church leaders from some of the fastest-growing churches in the country on a wide variety of topics. We do this because we want to help you find the best practices to apply at your church. Blind copying, however, is a terrible approach because it doesn’t ultimately force the transfer of the understanding behind the practice. It just copies the end-state practice.
Announcements Are About Increasing Engagement
The musical worship portion of what you do every weekend is about transcendence. You’re hoping that people will connect with God and get a clear picture of His love and care for them.
The teaching portion of what you do is about transformation as you open scripture and help people wrestle through how to apply those lessons to their daily lives.
The hosting portion, while typically the smallest piece of what happens on the weekend, is critically important because it’s about moving people to action. It’s about moving people beyond just thinking and getting them to actually take a step.
The announcements are the engagement engine!Talking about announcements and ensuring that you’re doing a good job on your announcements is about increasing the engagement at your church.
Most modern airplanes are flown on autopilot when they’re flying in the air, but they switch to human pilots when they go to land. Similarly, announcements are of the utmost importance and cannot be done on autopilot. You need the care of humans at your church making decisions around what’s happening in this aspect of your service. If you are looking to increase engagement at your church, diving deep into improving your announcements is a great place to begin.
Three Reasons Not to Copy and Paste the Announcements This Week at Your Church
- Your church isn’t in Alpharetta // Every resource you find online comes from a singular context and is written by a group of people that have a particular perspective on the world. While you might actually be in Alpharetta, Georgia, if the resources are from a different church community, then they don’t have the same context as your church. Your church is moving your people toward the next steps that you need your people to take. You need to develop a resource that has your community’s unique voice in it. Copying and pasting will make you sound like some other church in some other context and won’t meet the needs that you need to move forward.
- Your team has unique needs // You know that team member who does the announcements at your church who seems to get up every weekend and try to turn the five minutes of service hosting into their personal standup comedy routine? Or what about that leader who you really want to host, but they simply lack the confidence at this point to do that? No copy-and-paste resource will help you navigate the unique needs of your team. You need to move beyond these generic resources and find a way to train your people to build up their unique needs and approaches.
- You’re called to develop people // The training and equipping of people is core to what we’re called to do as church leaders. (Ephesians 4:12) Just because it might be easier to give people an online copy-and-paste resource that you found late one Saturday night doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. In fact, a little bit of inconvenient training can go a long way in helping your church improve not only in the announcements but in many aspects of what you do. Training is a critical part of how we help people grow and develop in their faith.
Looking for more help with your announcements? This FREE 3-part video series is for you.
Are you looking to improve the hosting of your weekend services?
Have you already tried improving this area but aren’t sure what to do next?
Are you ready to take the next steps to increase engagement in your announcements and ultimately your church? I’m releasing a FREE three-part video series designed to help your church with better weekend hosting. The lessons in this series come from my practical experience of hosting hundreds of services in multiple contexts and coaching many other leaders in this area. The three videos are:
- Video #1: 5 Reasons People Aren’t Listening to Your Hosting. Your first video will clearly define for you why people aren’t paying attention to the announcements in your services.
- Video #2: The One Best Practice to Ensure Higher Engagement with Your Announcements. In this video, you will understand what the single most important practice thriving churches change about their announcements to improve engagement.
- Video #3: 3 Church Hosting Myths Debunked. Finally, you will dive into three misunderstood myths about hosting announcements that move people to action.
