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Are Your Hands Dirty?

by Tim Schraeder on 07/22/2011 in Church Communications, Principles with 6 Comments
Are your hands dirty?

I’ve crossed over the six month mark of not being on staff at a church and am living a new life as a consultant. It’s been quite a transition. I’ve been doing a lot and learning tons… hence my lack of blogging.

It’s been quite a jolt to move from the everyday life of the church office where I felt like I was fighting different battles every day and moving a proverbial “mountain” forward, to now being in a situation where I’m flown in, Skyped in, and connected to churches around the country and being toted as an “expert.” To be honest: I don’t feel like an expert and the idea of being a consultant sometimes makes me nervous.

Here’s why:

It’s easy to make a lot of noise. Social media and blogging are wonderful platforms to share and connect, but they can also create a bit of a monster. It’s easy to accumulate fans and followers by making some noise… I think it’s entirely something different to actually be doing work that matters and having true influence.

I have been busy doing all sorts of projects… helping churches with capital campaigns, rebranding, consulting on communications, and many other things, but in the midst of that I realized that so much of the content I used to blog about here on my blog was fueled by the work I was doing every day in the church office. And if I’m really honest, while I’m still engaged in the same work at a new level, it’s hard for me to blog my thoughts or my rants when I’m not exactly in a context where I’m getting my hands dirty and implementing or putting my thoughts or ideas into practice.

I’ve learned that I’m far more wired to be an expert practitioner than a knowledgable expert. Talk is cheap. We can spent a lot of time critiquing and criticizing but it’s far more impactful to be a contributor. Doing means more than saying. Words put to action are what make a difference.

It’s not what you know or what you think that matters but what you actually do… the work. Your portfolio. I don’t care what you have to say or what you think. What have you done? But more than that, what are you doing now?

Our work is never done and learning is an ongoing journey. We always need to be students in the classroom of the world we live in. Things are changing so rapidly and so quickly that to stop learning, to stop growing, to stop doing new work is detrimental. You can’t base your future on work you’ve done in the past.

What you’ve done in the past lays the foundation for where you are today, but what you do today will determine where you go tomorrow… and the work you do tomorrow will impact the trajectory of your future.

In the celebrity culture we live in, and one even created in our Christian bubble, it’s easy to be an expert or an authority. With a little effort, some people skills, and a platform created by social media you can become somebody. But something I’m learning is that many of people who are doing some of the most remarkable work are unheard of and unknown simply because they are busy doing the work. They aren’t speaking at conferences, making a lot of noise, or have thousands of followers. They are busy with their hand at the plow focused on doing work that’s making an impact.

Now, I’m not saying that if you are called an expert or an authority and speaking at conferences that you’re not doing work that matters, but all of this is more of a humble reminder for all of us, including myself, that we’re never finished. We’ve never arrived. What you’ve done doesn’t matter as much as what you are doing now. What you are doing now sets the course for what you will do later.

I love my job. I love working with and helping other churches but part of me needed to engage back in “the work” at a very practical level. So, I’ve started to volunteer at my church. And if you would believe it, I’m doing their WEEKLY bulletin. There. I said it. It’s nothing major, just something simple and tangible. It’s keeping me engaged. And, believe me, I’m trying to figure a way to get them to go to a monthly bulletin. :)

So the moral of the story: don’t get so busy looking out at the fields trying to predict the weather or critiquing the crop… get engaged.

Cultivate the soil and do the labor.

Work.

Keep working.

Keep growing.

Keep learning.

The work we do and the Churches we all serve matter too much not to keep on striving to do something new.

Get your hands dirty.

That’s what speaks to me.

An Open Letter to Church Communication Directors

by Tim Schraeder on 12/17/2010 in Church Communications, Park, Principles with 7 Comments

Dear Church Communications People Everywhere,

In less than a week, I’ll be closing my office door at Park Community Church for the last time as well as closing the door on a nearly 10-year career of doing church communications. While in my new role I’ll still be championing the cause for church communications, it won’t be in the capacity of being an everyday practitioner. That being said, I have a few things I want to share with you while I’m still “one of you.”

First, know that what you do really matters.

Communications rests on different levels in the life of many churches, so regardless of where you fit on the flow chart, know that you do really matters. We’ve been entrusted with an incredible opportunity to share and communicate the message of the Gospel in new and creative ways. It’s more than letting people know about the next membership class, new sermon series or women’s prayer group. It’s more than doing bulletins, designing graphics or building websites. It’s more than responding to a tweet or posting a link on Facebook.  It’s about stewarding the opportunity God has given us in our hyper-connected world to help people find connection with Christ.

God has uniquely gifted each one of you with different creative gifts to express the message God is longing to communicate to your city through the work and ministry of your local church.  The things you write, design, or create help pave the road for people’s journeys back towards Christ. You may never be up front teaching or leading worship but the work you do helps to remove barriers so people hear and connect with the message. People may never know who you are or really understand what you do, but more times that not, something you’ve created or designed intersects someone and causes them to come to your church to find out more.

As silly or minute as it all may seem, in today’s world stuff like this matters. People will often form their first impressions of your church when they come to your website or see something you’ve designed that’s been put in their hands by a friend, mailman, or however else you may work to get your message out there. The time you spend picking out fonts or finding the right image, the tireless time you spend writing and revising, editing and redesigning all matters. You are helping to present your church, and ultimately Christ to your community.

How your church communicates is vitally important and in most instances, that responsibility rests on your shoulders. Don’t look at what you do as a job; consider it you holy calling. Let your passion for God flow into the things you create and ways you communicate. Recognize the immense responsibility you have and steward what God has given you to communicate with pixels, images, or words that express His heart and compassion to the world around you.

I could probably write a short novel about my heart for all of this and for all of you but let me condense it to a few bullet points:

There’s much more I could share with you all, but let me leave you with this thought:

In our ever-changing world God has given you the responsibility to communicate His unchanging message to a world that’s desperate and searching for hope.

I DO believe that the Church is the hope of the world and firmly believe that our greatest days are yet to come. While the world around us is shaking we stand on the truth of God’s Word and rest in His love and compassion. He is our hope.

Each one of us has the opportunity to share that Story, to tell of the Kingdom of God, to explain what is unseen and bring people into God’s glorious light. It’s not a secret to be kept but one that must be told again and again in different, creative ways.

We’ve got the greatest story to tell, how will YOU help your church share it?

“God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.” – Matthew 5:14-16, The Message

It’s been an honor serving the Church with you – remember greater things are yet to come!

Tim Schraeder

Be Inspired, Don’t Imitate

by Tim Schraeder on 12/08/2010 in Church Communications, Principles with 8 Comments

I’m continuing in my Reworking Church Communications series today, a blog series for church communications inspired by the book REWORK. If you need to catch up, check out: No One Cares About Your Church, Forget Your Mission & Vision, Stop Speaking in Tongues, Know Your Real Competition, and Constraints Are a Blessing.

One of my favorite TV shows right now is Hoarders on A&E.  It’s fascinating [and sad] to watch how people can let things accumulate around them and consume their lives. On a recent episode a woman had spent away her entire life savings buying designer handbags. At risk of having her home foreclosed on, her family intervened. They hoped by cleaning and reselling the over $350,000 worth of designer purses they could help save her home. As a team of appraisers began sorting through the huge collection they began to notice something unsettling… all of the purses were fakes. While they had Gucci, Prada, and Coach all over them, they were indeed imitations. The $350,000 collection only ended up being worth about $1,200.

It’s very easy to copy in our world today.

With a few keystrokes you can copy content, images, ideas, and code and repurpose them as your own. While it’s easy to do I’m fairly convinced that in most instances it’s not the right thing to do.

When we were all infants we learned to speak by imitating our parents. They would repeatedly say “ma-ma or da-da” until we could fumble our way to saying “mom and dad.” Imitating allows us to learn but eventually we need to find our own voice and begin telling our own stories.

In the church space especially we oftentimes think that because we are “all on the same team” that we can borrow, steal, or adapt content from one another and it’s ok. Well, it’s not. Some churches like LifeChurch.tv are incredibly generous by sharing everything they create, and many churches offer videos, media, and other things they’ve created for a small price that is invested back into their ministry. Having resources available like these is incredibly valuable for churches who don’t have the ability to produce videos, media or graphics. However, when you are consistently copying, borrowing, adopting or adapting ideas from other places you can lose the true sense of who you are.

In REWORK, Jason Fried shares some great ideas on why copying is such a bad idea. He says that copying skips understanding, and understanding is how you grow.

“You have to understand why something works or why something is the way that it is. When you copy and paste, you miss just that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath. So much of the work an original creator puts into something is invisible. It’s buried beneath the surface. The copycat doesn’t really know why something looks the way that it looks or feels the way that it feels or reads the way that it reads. The copy is a faux finish. It delivers no substance, no understanding, and nothing to base future decisions on.”

Strong words but they are so true.

When I first started in church communications I learned by imitating. I wrote to over 100 churches that were listed in Outreach magazine’s Top 100 issue and asked them for examples of what they were doing with their printed communications. I created an idea file and pulled from it for a few years as I was learning my way. Eventually I found my own aesthetic and voice and didn’t have to rely on others to create. From there, I took a posture of being inspired.

I think there is SO MUCH we can learn from watching other churches, organizations, and businesses. We need to learn from what works, we need to take notes and we need to be students… but we also need to understand that every church has its own story to tell and its own voice that needs to be heard. God has embedded something unique in each one of our churches that we are meant to bring to bear in the life of our communities.

When we copy what worked somewhere else we can be hindering what God wants to do through us right where we are. The Church is made up of people and people are all different with unique stories, needs, and experiences. Every church is different, requiring your creativity and insight to know how to communicate most effectively. Open source is great, learning from others is invaluable, but every church has a unique audience and importing what worked somewhere else might not translate in your context. You learn the most by doing things yourself.

The heart of the matter as it relates to copying for me is this: the first sentence of the Bible tells us we serve a creative God. God’s creativity is seen in the world around us. If we are made in His image then we have that same creativity inside of each one of us. We shouldn’t have to rely on other sources but simply look to the Source and find inspiration, creativity, and wonder.

Imitate as you are learning to find your voice… be inspired as you grow and mature… but don’t copy + paste. God is more creative than that and you have better stories to tell than someone else’s.

Avoid the temptation to copy + paste and commit to doing the hard labor of creating. Ask God to let you see your congregation and your community through His eyes. Listen to the stories being shared around you. Watch for the signs of what God is doing around you. Create from a place that is inside of you as God’s Spirit leads. Let the words you speak [or type], images you create, stories you tell, and things you craft be ones that bring life and light to the world around you. You can’t imitate or fake authenticity and originality, and that is what it takes to truly connect with others.

Jason Fried offers a simple way to determine if you are copying: if someone else is doing the bulk of the work you’re copying.

Control + C and Control + V makes things much easier to lift and adapt, but just as the Hoarders team discovered, imitations are just plain cheap. Be inspired, don’t imitate.

Some Things I’ve Learned About Leading Change

by Tim Schraeder on 12/07/2010 in Church Communications, Principles with 7 Comments

We live in a changing world.

Things are changing right before our very eyes and what was on the bleeding edge moments ago is now almost obsolete. We live in an instant society and culture, which brings tremendous challenges and opportunities to the Church. We have an unchanging message but the methods used to communicate it have continually adapted. From burning bushes and writing on the wall, to Baalam’s donkey and an audible voice complete with a dove descending from Heaven, God has chosen a wide array of mechanisms to communicate with men. In more modern times the Church has used stained glass, print, media and even flannel graph [that's how I was taught as a child] to communicate the Gospel.

The game has changed significantly in the last few years and what worked before isn’t working anymore.

We have a tremendous challenge as communications leaders to leverage what’s working now to communicate and engage with our congregations and communities. And, in so doing, we bring up a word that some churches have a hard time dealing with: CHANGE.

While churches get that change needs to happen in people’s lives they are oftentimes a bit resistant to the word when it comes to their methods and ways of doing things.

As communications leaders, who tend to be ahead of the curve on what’s happening, change usually comes from our end and knowing how to lead change is an indispensable art in leading communications. Over the last 10 years I’ve led both churches I’ve worked for through some significant changes in the ways we communicate and here’s a few things I’ve learned about change:

Earn Trust First

Before you can effectively lead change you need to earn trust. When I started on staff at Park I had a shortlist of things I wanted to change: the logo, website, bulletin, email, etc. However, if I would have jumped right in and started making change it would have caused some ripples. So, instead, for the first nine months I was on staff I took time to learn the culture of the staff and church, investing in relationships and getting to know people. During that time I maintained what was already in place and only changing things that absolutely needed to be changed. By taking that time to earn trust when I did start rolling out new ideas for how we were communicating I wasn’t “Tim the new guy,” I was “Tim who is my friend.” By earning trust I earned permission to begin bringing change.

You Aren’t a Smart as You Think

Just because you “get” social media, blog, are addicted to twitter, read Seth Godin and have an iPhone doesn’t make you an expert. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and think you know more than you really do, and all too often we can come across with a “know-it-all” kind of attitude. Don’t be like that. Realize that while you may be on the fast track to knowing all there is to know about what’s hot right now that there’s still a lot you don’t know. We need to always be in a posture of learning and not take ourselves too seriously.

Don’t Assume and Don’t Expect

You know what people say about assuming, right? Don’t assume that people will instantly understand or get what you are trying to sell. Realize that in the chaotic and ever-changing world that we live in that people are still catching up. Don’t assume people know and don’t expect them to understand why certain changes need to be made.

Be a Teacher, Not an Expert

Teachers help people understand a concept or idea. Experts often talk in lofty themes that only insiders understand. Choose to be a teacher. Teach people along the road of leading change. Explain to them in words and terms they understand why change needs to happen. Whenever people ask me why social media matters I always point to the Social Media Revolution video. That video, in under 4 minutes, explains what social media is and why it’s important in ways people can easily understand. Save yourself some breath and energy and use that! :) Remember people have different ways of learning, so be adaptable and have some empathy!

Show People Change

It can be hard to get people to agree to buy into something they can’t actually see. Instead of presenting a lofty idea of what is possible give people a picture of what change could look like. When I sold the idea of a monthly bulletin to the team at Park I made a prototype for them to see, touch, and take with them. Instead of saying, “we are going to kill our weekly bulletin and do a monthly,” and leaving them hanging, I was able to show them what the change would look like if it were implemented. They liked it and the rest is history.

Recently, my friend Mike at Calvary Chapel in Ft Lauderdale led the staff at his church through the change of going from a weekly to a monthly bulletin and created a webpage to explain the change and included multiple ways of explaining it… short form, long form and with a video. Brilliant!

Showing people what the end result is will help them make the decision to embark on the journey much, much easier.

Remind People that God is always Doing a New Thing

Whenever change is introduced in the church setting we naturally hear the response, “well that’s the way we’ve always done it.” I don’t know how or why it happened but a lot of churches have made an idol out of the way they do things. We’ve put the method over the message and get more upset over the method changing than the fact that the message isn’t being heard clearly. [I'll get off my soapbox on that one.] In these situations it may be a good time to conjure up some verses where the Bible clearly shows and says that God is always doing something new…

2 Corinthians 5:17
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new

Isaiah 43:18-19
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.

Ezekiel 36:25-27
And I will give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so you will obey my laws and do whatever I command.

    Philippians 3:13-14
    No, dear brothers and sisters, I am still not all I should be, but I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us up to heaven.
    Ecclesiastes 3:11
    He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
    Lamentations 3:22-24
    The unfailing love of the LORD never ends! By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day. I say to myself, “The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”

Remain Adaptable

One of the hardest parts of leading change is the fact that changing things are always changing. No one would have guessed about six years ago that anything would ever top MySpace. Well, today we have Facebook. Things are changing rapidly today and one of the challenges we face is that we always need to remain adaptable and willing to change when we need to. There have been many ideas or changes we’ve pursued in the way we communicate at Park over the past few years that worked for a season but eventually needed to be changed or phased out. Part of leading effective change is knowing when to pull to the plug and being willing to adapt.

Change Starts with You

Remember that change always starts with you.  Change matters and God has placed you where you are to make it happen. When you consider what’s at stake it makes the battles and challenges you face making change happen worthwhile. Just remember to stay humble, pray for wisdom, and ask God to guide you as you take what you are passionate about and bring it to bear in the life of your Church. Your ideas matter… you can do it!

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