We have a monthly meeting at our church that is called The Communications Roundtable. We are a busy and complex organization. There are lots of things going on and new activities and programs spring up from the grass roots on a regular basis. The roundtable is a conversation about how best to tell our story. There are two major focuses of our roundtable: How to tell our own members about what is going on and how to tell the wider community the good news of the mission and ministry of our congregation. Both are daunting tasks.

I once read that the average person can recall the names of about 350 other persons with dependable accuracy. Of course there are politicians who can come up with a thousand or more names, but they often use assistants or other techniques to help them. Once, when I was at a book signing for a politician, there were associates of the politician working the line of people waiting for our books to be signed. They would ask our names and chat a bit with us. From time to time those people would walk to the head of the line. When I became first in line, I was greeted by name by the politician. It was the first time we’d ever met. But average people have a wide variety of different ways of knowing others. Virtually everyone in our country would say that they have heard of Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald. That doesn’t involve knowing someone else. The characters aren’t even single individuals. There are plenty of celebrities that we can easily name. There are people in our community that we recognize or vaguely remember. I see people every day with whom I’ve had contact – perhaps even called by their name – but whose names I cannot presently recall. At a wedding rehearsal, for example, I have the names of all of the attendants listed in order on my notes. I use names as we go through the rehearsal. Then I go on to the next wedding. The participants in the wedding party usually only had to learn one new name on that day: mine. A few years later when we meet in the supermarket, the other person remembers, “That’s the minister who officiated at the wedding!” I look at that person and remember that we had once met, but cannot recall the context of our meeting.

The purpose of that convoluted paragraph is to say that not all the members of our church know each other’s names as we approach 600 members. They recognize each other, but they don’t really know each other. There are a wide variety of interests and passions in our congregation. So it is a challenge to simply get all of the activities and events out before the congregation in a way that they can make connections and form community.

We use a newsletter, a web site, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a weekly printed bulletin, announcements in worship, a scrolling screen video display, bulk e-mail, post card mailings, text messages and a host of other media to communicate events and activities at our church. It is our experience that most people need multiple reminders to really remember things. We do a lot of what we think is repetition, and later discover that there are people who don’t get the message. Just last week at a meeting of our Church Board a member bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t keep track of all of the groups and events taking place. It is true. No one person can keep track of everything that is going on. It is impossible for me to attend every meeting. We have too many things going on at the same time. We have a calendar program that allows us to layer the building-use calendar, our personal calendars, and the church events calendar on the same template. It uses different colors to differentiate different calendars. The result is a mosaic of events and activities that is too complex to print or distribute.

So in our church we need to be content to know part of what is going on. No one knows everything that is going on. The office works hard to organize and track events and activities, but conflicts do arise. Sometimes we have to improvise and move a location at the last minute. Sometimes people make assumptions about who can participate only to be disappointed. But we try to keep the lines of communication open. Each month when our Communications Roundtable meets we discover mistakes that we have made and plan new ways to communicate.

Communication with the wider community is an equally daunting challenge. We are one of more than a hundred and twenty church and parachurch organizations in our community. The newspaper has a part-time religion editor who covers some church events and we issue regular press releases about our activities. Getting coverage on radio are pretty much “hit and miss” occasions. Once in a while we will do something that catches the eyes of a camera crew or makes a news story, but it often seems random to us when we are noticed and when we are not. If we make the television news, it is usually a slow news day and the crews at the station are scrambling to fill airtime.

Many of our internal communications are also ways of communicating with the wider community. The religion editor at the paper subscribes to our electronic newsletter. Often that is how stories make it from our church to the newspaper. Our web site is for our members and for those who are searching for a congregation. We have both a public Facebook site and a smaller Facebook group.

The process of keeping up with communications is always a challenge and something that we do imperfectly. But communication is our primary business. We have good news to tell and we are continually trying to discover new ways to tell our story.

And when a member of our board says, “I can’t keep track of what is going on around here!” I take it as a good sign of a healthy congregation.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.