when the calendar gets loud
by Katie Clark
For many churches, this past Sunday was Welcome Back Sunday — the unofficial (or very official) signal that the program year has begun.
And suddenly, everything is moving.
Programs are starting. Committees are meeting again. Calendars are filling. Events that seemed comfortably far away in June are now alarmingly close. The pace of church work is never exactly quiet, but there is something about September that feels like shifting into a higher gear.
And somehow, from here, it feels like we're barreling headlong toward Advent.
To those of you who have already published your Advent schedules (ahem, York Minster) I salute you.
To those onboarding new staff, welcoming a new leader, rebuilding a team, or looking at your calendar and thinking, Wait, we're supposed to be planning Advent already? — solidarity.
But as the pace picks up, there's another temptation that comes with it, especially for those of us responsible for church communications:
We start communicating everything.
Every event gets a newsletter block. Every ministry gets a social post. Every announcement is important. Every deadline deserves bold type. We keep adding because there is, genuinely, a lot happening — and because the people responsible for each thing understandably want people to know about it.
Before long, the communications calendar starts looking an awful lot like the church calendar: crowded.
We talked about this recently during our “The Church Calendar Is Not a Strategy” Church Collaboration Meeting: Many churches fall into the habit of promoting every event equally and then wonder why people stop paying attention.
The problem isn't necessarily that we're communicating too much. It's that we're asking our audiences to figure out for themselves what matters most.
That's our job.
Good church communications aren't simply an accurate reflection of everything happening on the calendar. They're an opportunity to help people understand what matters, what's for them, and how all these individual activities connect to the larger mission of the church.
That requires choices — which can be particularly hard when we're moving fast.
So before adding the next announcement, event, or paragraph to the newsletter, it might be worth asking:
Who actually needs this information? Not everything needs to go to everyone.
What do we want people to do with it? Attend? Register? Pray? Volunteer? Simply know?
How important is this compared with everything else we're communicating right now?
Does this need another announcement — or does something else need more room to breathe?
What story are our communications telling about what our church values?
That last question may be the most important.
If someone knew nothing about your church except what appeared in its newsletter, social feeds, and website this month, what would they think mattered to you?
September is a good time to ask that question because the calendar is getting loud. And it will probably get louder before it gets quieter.
It's also a good time to remember that none of us has to have the whole program year figured out right now. Some churches are several months ahead. Others are working through leadership transitions, staffing changes, new systems, or simply the ordinary reality of ministry with limited time and limited people.
One of the gifts of doing this work in community is discovering that someone else has probably wrestled with the same question you're wrestling with now.
That's why our monthly Realm Database Support Group meetings, Administrators' Café Roundtables, and Church Collaboration Meetings aren't designed around having all the answers. They're places to bring questions, compare notes, hear what's working elsewhere, and occasionally discover that everyone else is figuring some of this out as they go, too.
So as the program year kicks into high gear, maybe the goal isn't to communicate more.
Maybe it's to create enough space — on our calendars and in our communications — to recognize what matters most, and make sure that gets heard.