Fixing Boring Church Announcements

by vernsanders on June 22, 2010

In case you didn’t get my point of view from the title, I think most church announcements are boring.

Part of the reason for that is that a lot of people just don’t know how to sound interesting (or interested) when they read something in public. Part of the reason is that a lot of church announcements are recurring, and so regular churchgoers just tune out. A big reason is that many laypeople believe that the only way people will attend their program event is if the pastor makes an announcement on Sunday morning, so the announcement time can just go on and on and on (cue Journey…).

Now some church announcements are anything but boring. Here’s one from the list at mistupid.com:

Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale. It’s a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don’t forget your husbands.

But if nobody’s listening, who’s going to hear it?

And perhaps you don’t have enough resources to do this, which I think is very cool…

And yes, you can do a powerpoint loop…but if you run that as people assemble, how many people actually look at it…all of it?

So what can you do?

In wandering around the internet, I found a site called xtranormal. It allows you to create animated videos with little effort. You choose a character (or 2) and a “location” from a menu, and then just type your announcements like you would ordinarily do. In less than 10 minutes, I created the video below:

In the interest of full disclosure, it cost me some money to “publish” the video above…roughly $1. And xtranormal’s site itself is not as helpful as it could be…an opinion shared by a lot of people, judging from the forum comments. And, in complete fairness, a google search returned a bunch of other sites, none of which I have yet explored.

But, for a small church, or one that just doesn’t have the resources to go full video, an animated announcement video might just spice things up from week to week.

What do you think? Are you using video for announcements? Do you think this might be an inexpensive alternative to another boring reading of your announcements? Please leave a comment below.

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June 22, 2010 at 7:44 am

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