Clarity is Care: Why Church Communications Need Restraint

by Mike Orr

If you work in church communications long enough, you begin to notice a pattern: the problem isn’t that your church lacks good ministries, meaningful events, or faithful leaders. The problem is that you have too many good things competing for attention at once.

Every ministry wants to be highlighted. Every event feels essential. Every leader is convinced that their thing will be the one that gets people more engaged. And, even as programs get added, we hold onto ones that “happen every year.”

And so the bulletin fills up.
The newsletter grows longer.
The website becomes cluttered.
Social media turns into a never-ending scroll of announcements.

The result? Parishioners don’t engage more—they disengage. Faced with too many invitations, people quietly choose none. They stop opening the email, and scroll past the social media posts – if they’re even showing up in their feed anymore.

Competing for Attention Is Competing for Time

Here’s the harder truth: your ministries aren’t just competing for bulletin space. They’re competing for people’s lives.

Churchgoers today are stretched thin. Work schedules shift. Kids’ calendars are packed. Caregiving responsibilities pile up. When churches ask people to attend worship, serve, join a group, show up to a meeting, volunteer for an event, and take a class—all in the same season—people are forced to choose.

And when everything is framed as urgent, nothing actually is. Good communication helps people discern what matters most right now. Poor communication asks them to figure it out on their own.

The Communications Pie

Your church has a finite amount of attention to spend. No matter how many platforms you use, you are still working with limited space and limited human capacity. Every announcement, story, or invitation takes a slice. When one slice grows, another must shrink.

The mistake many churches make is pretending the pie is unlimited: It isn’t. When every ministry is promoted all the time, nothing feels prioritized. The church sends mixed messages about what truly matters, leaving people to sort it out for themselves.

Start With Vision, Not Volume

The most important communications decision your church can make isn’t how to promote something—it’s whether it should be promoted at all, and how often.

That decision has to flow from vision:

• What kind of church are you trying to be?

• What discipleship pathways are you inviting people into?

• Where do you most want people to invest their limited time and energy?

If your church emphasizes formation, that slice of the pie should be large and visible. If justice and outreach are central to your identity, they deserve consistent prominence. If welcoming newcomers is a priority, that invitation should not be buried.

Every church has values. Your communications pie should make those values visible week after week, not just in its mission statement.

Decide the Pie and Commit to It

Healthy church communications require leadership alongside logistics. That means deciding in advance how many items you will promote in each channel. It means determining how those promotional “slots” are distributed across ministries and how often each ministry appears over the course of a year. When this is done well, something powerful happens: the conversation shifts.

Instead of ministries asking, “Can you promote this?” they ask, “Which of our events is most important to promote right now?” Instead of communications leaders saying “No,” they say, “Yes, when it fits the plan.”

The plan becomes the authority, not the personality. Scheduling promotions weeks or months in advance isn’t bureaucratic—it’s pastoral (See above about competing for time.). Simply putting some effort into your communications plan reduces conflict – both logistical and interpersonal – creates transparency, and protects staff and volunteers from burnout. An additional benefit is that leaders can see, through a visible communications plan, how different church ministries fit into the whole.

The ultimate goal of church communications is not just awareness, it’s movement: Movement from spectator to participant, from newcomer to community member, from consumer to disciple, from curiosity to involvement.

A clear communications pie tells that story over time. It shows people where they are being invited next and reassures them that they don’t have to do everything to belong.

Church communications don’t need more creativity, more platforms, or more urgency. It needs clarity. When you decide on your pie and commit to it, you stop reacting and start leading. You move from managing noise to cultivating focus. And in a world overflowing with messages, that kind of intentional restraint isn’t just good strategy, it’s good ministry.