Have you ever been seated in a restaurant only to discover that the noise level is so loud you can’t think, much less have a conversation? It happens all the time. Recently at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship, we gathered our entire staff together to answer the question, “How noisy is our messaging when we try to communicate with our church?”

As our staff entered the room, they were met with blaring music coming from all directions. The music was, as my dad liked to say about my early rock ’n’ roll garage band, loud and lousy! We couldn’t hear ourselves think, much less hear each other, as our team started a discussion. It was interesting to watch the body language of the group members as the meeting started. Some smiled and sang to one of the songs being played; others were irritated and tuned out the whole experience. Some just sat stunned by the barrage of noise assaulting them.

When I asked if they could hear us, we got shouts from all over the room in unison: a huge “no.” Our response was calculated and hit the point; we told the team, “This is just what we’re doing to our church. We are putting out so much noise in our communications that no one can hear us.”

As I mentioned in the opening of this article, we’ve all had the experience of going out to dinner, only to have the evening disrupted by the noise level. We’re finding that the trick to good communication at Bent Tree is to control the level of noise at our church.

Communication is a buzz that many churches, including ours, are working to figure out. Like most churches, we frequently get requests to put something in the bulletin, or to have an announcement made. All of these requests represent great ministries and great purposes, but are these announcements the best use of our resources? Can the senior pastor get up and cast a vision for the future of the church, and then ask people to come to a bake sale? Will those be seen as balanced messages?

Today, the communications team at Bent Tree is working hard to partner with our ministries. We don’t have a policy manual; we have a partnering guide. We work as an extension of the ministries, helping to guide and work alongside them in developing cohesive strategies to best communicate to the church body.

Electronic communication tools, such as the Web site and e-newsletters, are affecting our church in a positive way. Our church is becoming more and more accustomed to using these resources. The recent re-launch of our Web site, www.btbf.org, has nearly doubled our visits per month; and our weekly e-newsletter is building an audience that allows us to communicate interesting articles, stories of life change and weekly events for all ministries church-wide. Announcements are made both before and after services via video, to allow for both messaging and a more seamless worship environment.

As we approach our move-in date for our expanded facility, scheduled for early January 2008, Senior Pastor Pete Briscoe is working with the elders, senior staff, and communications team to help nail down our messaging, communications and branding. Our current 16-week sermon series, “Opening the Door,” walks through our mission, purposes, virtues and values as a church. All of these are tied to the new tagline, “Experience Life.” As Christians, we are called to live the abundant life. We so often forget this in day-to-day church life and communications. Because we are in the midst of a major expansion project, we realize that our messaging and communications need to be clear and simple. Our messaging needs to have the ability to be communicated in a two-minute elevator speech.

Our church is about experiencing life, but the spotlight is not on the experience; it’s on the life we are called to lead. In our communications, messaging and branding, there are three simple things we are calling people to remember: life in Christ, life with people and life transformed. If we can get our members to focus on these three simple aspects of who we are, we’ll count that as a huge win.

Like most churches, we have a well-written and accurate mission statement that reflects the Great Commission, as well as a set of values, a doctrinal statement and our purpose. These beliefs make up our DNA; they make us who we are. The balance comes in allowing people to understand a few simple things – to roll back the noise and allow them to hear the balanced melody of living a life fully engaged in Christ.

We will always work toward finding equilibrium in communicating to our church. There will always be bulletin requests, reasons for stage announcements and ministries needing to be promoted. The goal for communications is finding ways of getting the message into people’s hands while still maintaining the simplicity of communicating who we are as a church. There are great tools out there today, and they can help us get massive amounts of messaging to a broad demographic. The trick is keeping the noise level down to a crystallized focus: living for Christ.