Stop Copying and Pasting the Announcements for Your Church!

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.

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