A client asked me recently what the American church can actually do about a problem we all already know is true: our communications are behind, sometimes by years, sometimes closer to a decade.
My first instinct was to talk about platforms and trends, since that’s usually where “behind” gets measured. But the more I sat with the question, the more I don’t think it’s about pace. Most churches are still running on an old idea of what communications is for. That old idea is what’s actually behind the outdated websites and stale newsletters, not a failure to catch up or keep up.
For a long time, church comms meant announcements. You told people what was happening this week and where to show up. That model assumed a captive audience who already attended and just needed logistics. The bulletin worked because everyone reading it was already in the building on Sunday.
That’s not the world anymore. Someone deciding whether to visit your church for the first time is watching your website and your last few emails to figure out whether they can trust you. A member who’s quietly drifting is making the same read. Communications isn’t relaying details to people who already showed up. It’s how people who haven’t committed yet decide whether to. A lot of churches moved the old announcement model onto newer tools without updating the thinking behind it. The newsletter became a weekly information dump. The website became a digital bulletin board. The channel changed. The purpose behind it didn’t.
Here’s why that matters for the “behind” question. If comms had been treated as a role with real purpose, someone would have eventually asked what it’s actually for and adjusted accordingly. But comms in most churches isn’t a role. It’s a task that gets passed around or bolted onto someone’s existing job. Someone sets something up, and then life happens. They move, they change jobs, their season of volunteering ends. Whatever they built keeps running on autopilot, because updating it means learning a system nobody ever trained the next person on, let alone stopping to ask whether it’s still doing what it needs to do.
So the fix isn’t speed, and it isn’t chasing the newest platform. It’s authority and clarity of purpose. A church needs someone who actually owns comms as a real function. That means enough standing to make updates without six people weighing in first, enough protected time to do routine maintenance instead of only firefighting for the next event, and enough clarity on what comms is actually for to make good calls instead of just keeping the lights on.
I want to be clear this isn’t a knock on the churches doing this work with almost nothing. A huge number of the churches I work with have exactly one person on staff, and that person is also preaching, running visitation, and planning the budget. If that’s you, the goal isn’t to build a comms department overnight. It’s to get honest about what your comms are actually for, whether that’s building trust with people who haven’t walked in yet or helping your own members feel like they still belong. Then pick the smallest number of things that serve that purpose well. Simple and intentional will always beat polished and purposeless.
You’re not behind because you haven’t caught up. You’re behind because the model never got updated. Those call for very different fixes, and only one of them is actually within reach.
If this has you wanting to think more seriously about your church’s comms setup, a few starting points worth your time:
Nonprofit Marketing Guide, run by Kivi Leroux Miller, is built for nonprofits but translates well to churches, especially on the basics of planning and staff capacity.
MyCom, from United Methodist Communications, is a good listen if you want practical conversations on outreach and digital ministry from people doing the work day to day.
And if you want a low pressure place to talk through this with other people doing the work, Communicators Club is free and meets the first Wednesday of every month. We’re on a summer break right now, but we’re back October 7th.
Go disrupt something,
Christen
