What is the ultimate goal of a sermon? The specific answers to this question could range broadly depending on the subject matter of the individual message, but the broad response should always be life-change in the direction of Jesus Christ.

As we continue to assist many churches with developing promotional materials that highlight upcoming messages, I have become increasingly fascinated with the process through which churches are luring their neighbors into their worship centers. An overwhelmingly common theme: churches are trying to bring the messages of the Gospels and testaments into a relevant space that offers real solutions to the obstacles of daily life.

The approaches to sending this message are not nearly as consistent. In the name of relevance, many churches use movie lingo and reailty television references in series themes to build bridges to popular culture. Others utilize catchy, one-word phrases and eroded visual textures to make the church seem ‘edgy’ and not quite so ‘religious.’ Many churches are swapping terminoligy like amen, halleluia, and almighty for yeah, you rock, and awesome respectively. Preaching is out, talking is in. Suits are hung in the closet as jeans and intentionally-ripped t-shirts are worn in their places.

If the point is humbly serving Jesus and helping people to connect with Him, than these methods can all be effective means. The difficulty facing the church going for relevance is that it is all too easy to be catchy and clever without having any real content. I have sat in on a meeting where I watched church leaders struggle to find five points of a sermon that start with the same letter, followed by a scrambled search for bible passages that relate to the points just crafted.

Some churches let their pendulum swing all the way towards clever marketing and lose sight of the substance. Perhaps you know someone in church leadership who schemes tirelessly about how to fill the seats. If this is the primary focus, I can offer a guarantee that the actual message and its applications and implications will be forgettable at best and heretical at worst. In a similar manner, if a pastor has a life-changing message ready to go but no one is prompted to hear it, all is just as lost.

As with so much of the Christian life, striking a balance is the solution. Church Graphics.org has outlined three broad, essential components of any church marketing campaign. As you work to balance the three elements, your messages will be substantive and there will be listening ears waiting to hear them.

I remember being taught to use a rod and reel by my mother, an avid recreational fisherwoman. To catch our would-be supper of flaky flounder from the bottom of the cove, we needed a hook, a line, and a sinker. I’d like to make the argument that in order to become fishers of men, we need to have the same three components present in our approach to church marketing.

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The Hook
Maybe a clever phrase, stunning image, catchy website, an element of curiosity, an irrisistable question, an invitation, an offer… It might be delivered in the form of a direct-mail piece or email blast, or maybe a true buzz approach – rippling through your community by word-of-mouth. A hook is the marketing campaign itself – something for the fish to nibble on. It is the very thing that will make someone look twice, garnish attention, engage the viewer. Without a hook, your message will go unnoticed. Hooks I’ve seen implemented by churches include coupons for free coffee and cookies, broad rhetorical questions with flourescent punctuation, clever visual imagery, even in some rare cases actual carnival rides for kids during the service.

A hook is not biblical, and it is not anti-biblical. There is nothing of substance in the actual hook, and often nothing of lasting value can be found in the hook itself. A hook is nothing more than a tool – an effective way to get someone’s attention. The reason for offering a hook is to engage. Without an engaging offer, opportunity, or question, there will be little result.

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The Line
A hook is nothing more a floating barb. It is only functional if it is attached to the solid ground by a line. For the sake of this marketing discussion, a line is the message itself – the life-changing truth that ultimatley will connect your neighbors to the love of Jesus. A guest of your church who grabbed onto the hook you cast will quickly swim away if there is no reason to stay. A church marketing campaign is only about getting people through the doorway, but once there it is important that the message given is a perfect balance of biblically true and applicaable to daily living.

Without a substantive and relevant message, a church is nothing, and it is a safe guess that most congregants attend these places out of a sense of guilt or obligation. A hook is an initial connection, but a life-changing, easily understood message will sustain as no hook ever could.

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The Sinker
A hook attached to a line washes around in the tide. Necessary is something of weight that allows the line to sink deeply and ground itself. We refer to the sinker as a point of application or implication. The sinker sends a message to the listener such as, “You’ve just heard the truth. What are you going to do about it?” Saying this is not enough. If you are talking about the importance of serving others, you need to create tangible opportunities on the calendar for people to serve others. If discussing the importance of accountability, there needs to be groups that listeners can readily join. If the message highlights the importance of married couples to spend time together, there needs to be occassional childcare options offered at the church so couples can spend a few hours together as recommended.

How many sermons have you heard in your lifetime? How many do you remember? Sinkers are the real-life provisions that make a message instantly and easily applicable. Make sure your message doesn’t get lost in a shuffle of old note sheets. Allow the message to sink in deeply by moving it outside of the walls of the worship service.

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Church Graphics.org consults with churches and non-profit organizations on the specific implementation of these ideas. If you have an upcoming series of messages, please contact us. We look forward to partnering with you and making sure this next series connects people to the message and inspires lasting life-change.

Exploring the Fine Lines of Making Sermons Memorable

In the course of my higher education, I have only bumbled through two biblical survey classes, which were at best a broad overview. My understaning of scripture largely derives from late night wrestling sessions with brief passages.

Recently, I have been hungry for the words of Jesus Christ, aiming to allow His teachings to infiltrate my heart without letting my preconceived musings about Christianity pollute their ability to form my life. Though I could never claim to be a theologan or even a scholar, I have been gathering an undeniable truth from reading His sermons and parables night after night:

The words of Jesus Christ are memorable.

Well of course, you say (and rightfully so)… After all, the passages we have are the centuries-old, unchanged accounts that have spoken to the very roots of our family trees. I certainly am not trying to break ground by saying so, but we do have to acknowledge that the words of Christ are at once relevant and timeless, simple and profound, pervasive and direct.

As pastors, you toil relentlessly in the word, crafting several minutes worth of oration week upon week. Undoubtedly the goals of Christ’s communication become the paradigm of your constructions, and your backspace button gets as much exercise as any of the other keys as you commit yourself to a masterpiece of oration that will stand indelible and strong in the minds of your parishoners.

Why then do most, if not all, congregants forget what you said as soon as the yeast rolls pop out of the oven to make their appearance at the Sunday dinner table?

It is upon me to note that I am a classic example of the average sermon consumer. My deficit of attentiveness combines with the hyper-stimulation of movies, ipods, and digitized radio that pop culture so readily offers, and I regularly become the quintissential thorn in the side of my pastors – checking out the bulletin announcements, musing about nearby lunch options, and even occasionally nodding off. If I were a pastor, I wouldn’t be able to stand people like me!

Each week, I work to wrap aesthetic shemes around pastors’ sermon series ideas, creating visual touchstones that are wallpapered onto screen presentations, bulletin covers, posters, banners, and even temporary tattoos. (Okay, I have never actually produced a sermon logo that was henna dyed onto anyones forearm.) Sometimes these promo pieces become banners on the web, paid ads on search engines, and blocks in the local newsprint. The promotions serve their purpose, and the parking lot begins to fill in time for the 10:30 a.m. service.

So let’s say that you are facing a pew-ful of 500 or so. You are confident that you hold the reference to the bible passage the Lord wants you to communicate, and you can feel the passion of the Holy Spirit begin to pulse in your veins as you prepare to be the voice through which the Lord communicates.

Problem – Already, Irma Gladys is fiddling with her Tic-Tacs, Big Joe is eying the fresh supply of female visitors, and Susie-Q has commenced with her tradition of penciling gossip for her friends to read onto the stock of tithe envelopes. What do you do?

You might have tried raising your voice and other scare tactics. Maybe you like to form your points into clever acrostics that spell S.A.L.V.A.T.I.O.N., or E.S.C.H.A.T.O.L.O.G.Y. Perhaps you are into one-word sermon titles that evoke adrenalized images like ‘DRIVE’, or ‘IGNITE.’ Maybe all six of your bullets start with the letter ‘F’.

I have heard all such sermons, and I must confess that clever linguistic hooks, video clips, and yes, finely crafed graphics packages do occasionally help to gel the points into cohesion. Just as often though, these schemes can present themselves as stale substitutes for impactful, relevant truth that does indeed penetrate the heart.

Some look at a wheel of the finest bleu cheese and see a decadent, creamy experience offering sharp bite and brightly colored smoky, salty notes. Others see mold and stench. If you are a precher that favors weekly acrostics to get the point across, imagine that you cease this practice for whatever reason. Half of your congregants will hail you as innovative and daring, while the other half will bellyache about the loss of this memory aid. What is a pastor to do?

If bleu cheese is delight to one and disgust to another, I think it is safe to make the assumption that most creations of man will exist in this realm: embraced by some and disregarded by others. Maybe the key to crafting memorable sermons is to look to the one whose teachings can not in any way be labeled as human invention.

Jesus Christ is always concise, direct, illustrative, and is willing to say the hard things, even when the things needed to be said cause some to be offended. As you faithfully work to craft sermons that are true to the word of God and relevant to a complex contemporary culture, remember that Christ departed from conventions and expectations.

If your flock is settling in for a twenty minute discourse centered on words that rhyme with ‘HOLY’, you may want to consider telling a short story (parable), giving a few sentences of explanation, and sending the listeners into small discussion groups armed with application questions. Only one teacher who roamed the earth was fully God. As you add creative graphic solutions, language constructions, and poetic cleverness to your lesons, don’t rely on them. Be sure there is clearly room for Jesus Christ to dictate your style and approach, and your offering of truth will be far more memorable.

Part 2: Image Size and Resolution

Countless times when asking for a logo file, I have been directed to a ministry’s website where I can right-click on an image and save it onto my hard disk for later use. This seems like a logical progression: here is the logo looking crisp and wonderful on the screen, and how much better it is to get the artwork this way than having to dig through years-old discs to find the original file.

In my endless quest to never print another pixilated image, I am writing in order to take a touch of the mystery away from the issue of image sizing and resolution.

Imagine that you want to construct a 12” tall letter ‘A’ from building blocks. You can choose to create your masterpiece out of Lego blocks or Duplo blocks. (Remember Duplo blocks – the big, chunky building toys too large for toddlers to swallow?) You are limited by size (12”), and you want the edge of the letter to be as detailed as possible. You would definitely use Lego blocks instead of Duplos to form the shape of the letter because they are smaller and allow you to include more detail in the sculpture.

Digital images work in this same way. Each image file has two variables, its dimensions, and its pixel density. Two images may have exactly the same dimensions as each other but would yield drastically different print results if their pixel density values were different.

You may have heard someone mention the terms ‘DPI’ or ‘PPI’ (Dots Per Inch / Pixels Per Inch). Referring to image density, the terms relate to the number of dots (or pixels) that can be found in a horizontal or vertical inch of the file.

Let’s say your church logo is a square that generally prints in a 1” x 1” area. If we prepared the file at 10 DPI, it would mean that 10 dots would form each row of graphic data and 10 dots would form each column of graphic data, for a total of 100 dots. Now imagine if I gave you 100 white and black Lego blocks and asked you to build a version of your logo out of them. The result would be pretty jagged.

The relationship between the dimensions of an image and the image density works like any good old-fashioned ratio. If I have an image that is 1” x 1” at 100 DPI, I can change the size to 2” x 2”, and the DPI to 50, and the image would not change quality at all. There still would be 100 dots forming each row of horizontal and each row of vertical information.

Onto the ‘magic’ numbers. If you are designing a piece intended to print, the minimum DPI you want to use is 300. Many professional printing companies will ask for 350, 600, or in some rare cases 1200 DPI files, but for the most part 300 is adequate.

For web design, all that is needed is 72 DPI. This is a major degradation of the image compared to the resolution of print images that are over 4X the size. Why is this?

The information displayed on computer monitors only displays at 72 dpi (in most cases), which is not all that much. If you snuggle up with your display, you will see that most the letters and shapes on display actually have fuzzy edges. This is called anti-aliasing. An alias is a five-dollar word for a little jagged edge that is created when a shape is produced at a low resolution. This sophisticated anti-aliasing process occurs every time you type a single letter in your email program.

Distance is said to be the great healer when it comes to graphic issues, and when you sit a foot or two away from your monitor, what once was fuzzy appears clean and crisp. Don’t be fooled though, the graphic designer who constructed your website took your nice crisp logo and down-sampled it to 72 DPI which will ONLY look good when displayed on-screen.

Printing presses, and even home inkjet printers are capable of producing a much higher volume of dots per square inch. Our eye is much more accepting of low resolution on our screens than it is with any printed material. There is a lot of mind-bending science as to why, but the important thing is to accept that this is true.

Have you ever tried printing a graphics-heavy web page? What was dramatic and lively on the screen becomes a pixilated, jagged, lifeless mess. The DPI issue is one of the major factors in the disappointing printout.

An image down-sampling is a one-way street. An image with a lot of resolution can always be scaled down further. Once the degradation has occurred, the only way to get a larger version is to return to the original file, make another copy and down-sample it to the new desired size.

So next time you wish to have your logo produced on a brochure, don’t go running for your home page, and whatever you do STAY AWAY from the right-click button. Open up the bottom desk drawer and dig out the original source file. You’ll be glad you did.

Part 1: Understanding Bleeds

“This file you sent does not bleed.”

What sounds like a morbid statement from your designer actually refers to an extra bit of ink printed around the edge of your file that will later be trimmed off to give your printed piece a clean ink-to-the-edge aesthetic.

If the final size of a postcard is going to be 8.5” x 5.5” and you don’t want to have a homemade-looking white border around the design, then you will have to build some bleeds around the edge of your piece. Usually 1/8 of an inch (.125”) is adequate, however some printers are more specific about the size of bleed necessary for good output.

The size of the document sent to press becomes 8.75” x 5.75” and should be sent to the printer with instructions that a .125” bleed was included on all four sides and should be trimmed away once printed.

This has bearing on your in-house pieces as well. If a designer is going to be preparing a file for you to print on a color copier in the back room at your church, they will need to know some information from you about that machine before work can begin.

Supposing the piece a designer crafts for you has a largely navy blue background with white (reversed) text. The piece is meant to be a letter, so the finished size is to be 8.5” x 11”. There are two choices:

1) Have the designer build the file with no bleeds. This means that the final file dimensions will be 8.5” x 11” exactly, and that their design will have to include some sort of white space around all four edges of the design to make sure that the file accommodates the machine’s margin printing limitations.

2) Instruct the designer to build the file with bleeds. In this case, the final file they send will be oversize (8.75” x 11.25”), which means it is no longer printable on standard letter paper. If this is the workflow you choose, you will need to print the file centered on tabloid (11” x17”) paper and trim off the extra ink once the file has printed.

Introduction

“Did you receive the concept comps I sent via pdf?”

“There is not adequate DPI in this file for press.”

“The file you sent has no bleeds.”

You and your colleagues can throw around terms like ‘missiology’ and ‘eschatological’ with the best of them. You communicate the word of God in clear and relevant ways week after week. You skillfully guide the downtrodden through counseling conversations that bring hope from the throes of despair.

“Why then,” you rightfully inquire “can it be so difficult to communicate with my graphic designer?”

The answer is a bouquet of factors, most stemming from the combination of industry-specific vocabulary and sensory-driven artist personalities. Communicating with an artist is an issue worth discussing, and the staff of ChurchGraphics.org will broach the topic soon. Until then, this series of articles is intended to take a touch of mystery out of the ubiquitous lingo that designers will throw your way.