Often, when we think of good communication, we focus on what we say rather than why we say it and how we are saying it. In some ways, the “what” is the easiest part of communication. In a blog on ChurchLeadership.com, retired pastor, Joel Snider, provided 4 keys to more effective church communication. The original entire blog can be accessed here https://www.churchleadership.com/leading-ideas/4-keys-to-more-effective-church-communication/. In the next few blogs, I will attempt to capture the highlights.
The article begins with the following summary quote, “Joel Snider explains that a healthy church culture requires constant attention to good communication.” In our last post we included a link to a quiz that allowed you to evaluate your communication skills. If you have not had a chance to review that it might be worth pausing here to do so. It is important to understand where you are so you can also understand where you might need to improve.
Although we may naturally tend to think that we are already effective, the blog begins with a challenging statement, “it is almost impossible to communicate too much.” We may tend to think of communication as announcements in church, blast e-mails or additions to our webpage or social media. While these are all important and worthwhile, they are limited components of the whole process which must become a core process to your overall leadership.
One of the first areas the pastor addresses is the quality of our decisions. Often, it is easier to minimize involvement of others or even to just make a unilateral decision which we think is best for the parish. It then follows that we use different means of communicating that decision to the broader staff and congregation. We should actually do something quite different. While effective decision making cannot obviously involve everyone all the time, broader involvement, when possible, allows for greater collaboration and engagement. A diversity of input can often lead to better, more acceptable decisions.
In addition to improving the quality of the decision, engaging a bigger group can facilitate transmission of the message. Consider the following example. Many people in the US and even other countries have heard of Paul Revere and his famous midnight ride. Very few people, however, have ever heard of William Dawes. Both riders were given the same task of informing people of the impending British invasion. There was a critical difference, however, in how they approached that mission in regard to our topic of effective communication.
Paul Revere was actually out for a shorter period of time and covered less territory, but his message was more widely and quickly disseminated than Dawes. Revere had a stronger network. He reached out to different tradesmen, farmers, militia men, patriots, etc. and they in turn rapidly spread the news among their friends. Dawes approached a smaller, less diverse crowd so had to spread the information by himself more broadly.
The lesson for us as effective communicators is that if we, like Revere, engage a broader, more diverse network in sharing information we can be assured that our message will reach more people in a timely manner. We will pick up here in our next blog.