Why Church Leaders Can’t Stand Doing Announcements

Do you dread being asked to get up and host a weekend service at your church?

Can just talking about hosting the announcements this coming weekend make your stomach turn?

Is your team pushing you to drop the announcements? And maybe even more worrying, do you have a good reason not to drop them?

Are you convinced something is wrong with the announcements at your church, but you’re not sure how to fix it?

As a leader, are you confused about how you can improve this aspect of your church services?

Over the last two decades, I have been leading churches from the second chair. I’m not the primary communicator, but I love leading on the operations and communication sides of what we as leaders do in the local church to help them grow and reach more people. So, that means that for hundreds of weekends, I have hosted weekend services in a bunch of different contexts.

In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about how to do announcements well and ensure that this aspect of our weekend service is successful.

I’ve had some pretty awkward experiences during weekend services that I don’t want you to repeat, like the time I walked out onto the stage to do the announcements after our band’s second song, only to find out later that the band had planned to do three songs!

I’ve also learned a lot from coaching other church leaders, helping countless campus pastors get over their fear of doing announcements and raising awareness of why this part of what they do is so critically important to the development of their particular faith community.

I understand that your team may not like doing the announcements or hosting your church service. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of reasons church leaders give for disliking doing the announcements. Here are a few:

The Laundry List

We’ve all seen someone get up to host a weekend service, and we can tell by the way they’re looking at the piece of paper in their hands that they have a long, boring list of items they need to talk about.

They have four or five different things from three different departments happening over the next four weeks that they’re required to somehow speak about each of them with an equal amount of passion and energy.

This is a terrible way to do the announcements. No one should ever have to rattle off a laundry list of items. In fact, the best practice is to narrow the focus, and have one item, two at the most, that the person who is hosting the service needs to move people towards.

The Speed Bump

Imagine for a moment that you are participating in an incredible weekend service. The music at the front-end is transcendent. It’s helping connect you with God and is taking you to a new place. It’s being spoken in a deep way that is sometimes hard to communicate with just words.

And then, at that moment, the host gets up and places a giant speed bump in the middle of the service.

The service takes a dramatic turn to focus on some problem with the youth ministry. There’s a plea to the congregation to step in and help prevent the kids from running wild in the streets.

Speed bumps happen when the church leadership doesn’t think clearly about the place that announcements have in the overall flow of a weekend worship experience. It shouldn’t detract from everything else that’s happening. In fact, good hosting should feel like an extension of the worship and teaching moments during weekend services.