Last week, in my Monday Morning Email newsletter, I posed the following question.
I’ve been thinking about church announcements. Are they part of worship or not? Are they boring or not? In poking around on the internet, I’ve found something that I think is cool. Imagine being able to do your announcements at church in a way that will catch people’s attention. Now imagine that all you have to do is make a couple of choices, and type in your announcements. You might get something like the video below. Please click and play it…it is less than a minute, and I think it is cool. It took me about 10 minutes to do. Let me know what you think. Would this work for you?
I had a number of replies.
Charlotte Smith said:
I have to admit, in planning our worship we find announcements so frustrating. While there are some that are incredibly important, who wants to take time from worship? We’re always looking for alternatives!
Melissa Taggart thought it was great, but…:
What an interesting tool! I did play around with it, and although I think the voice is a little creepy, it has given me the idea to lift our announcements off our CD recordings and embed them onto our website. So thanks for the inspiration
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Vicki Carr also liked the video:
I thought the little guy was cute, and it caused me to listen to what you/he had to say. Concerning announcements, though, I’m of two minds. They serve to inform visitors of other events they might wish to attend. They also interrupt the flow of the worship service. However, when designing any event, you need ebb and flow, so announcements do fit in the ebbing part, don’t they?
At our church we run a slide show of announcements before the service starts. After the service starts, and following the opening praise/worship music segment, we have baptism, baby dedication, announcements of special speakers to be aware of. At the END of the service, just before “invitation” responders have been introduced, one of the assoc. pastors informs of VBS, special events, new bible studies, etc. I still would rather they didn’t make ANY announcements until the end.
Finally, Jeanette Keyser had a different point of view:
I like the announcements. It helps me keep up with what’s going on in church. We do that at the beginning, then start the worship.I think that video is silly. We have enough stupid stuff going on with mikes that don’t work and sound people not paying attention and people running out during the sermon to go to the bathroom.
Interestingly enough, my own pastor read last week’s MME, and decided to use the technology for an announcement yesterday. We had some technical difficulties (right on Jeannette), so it didn’t work the first time, but when it did run, the congregation reacted very favorably.
What do you think? Please leave a comment below.
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