Communicating With Church Members Using Sms

A church is more than the sum of its parts

A church is more than the sum of its parts. While to an outsider the visible manifestation of a church may be the coming together of pastor and members at a place of worship, churches involve themselves in a far wider range of activities. House meetings and prayer groups, voluntary work and fundraising events, recruiting new members and supporting existing ones; all go on throughout the week. Such activities make the church a vibrant community of individuals bound together by their faith, rather than a building where people come to carry out religious observances.

Effective communication is vital to ensure that members are kept informed of church news, events and activities and feel included within its faith community. Twenty or thirty years ago, members would have been informed of church activities via a printed magazine and a church notice board. Churches today have a membership which is much less tied geographically than in the past. Even established churches will find that their congregation includes a significant number of members from outside the parish, while evangelical churches often draw their members from a very wide area. In such circumstances, the word of mouth cannot be relied on as an effective means of communication with church members.

It may sound like a clash of the old and the new, but increasingly churches are turning to SMS, also known as text messaging, as a means of communicating with their members. SMS allows short messages of up to 140 characters to be sent between compatible mobile phones and has grown rapidly to become an incredibly popular means of personal communication; globally 193,000 SMS messages per second were sent in 2010. Underpinning the growth of SMS has been the development by SMS system providers which allow SMS messages to be sent from email or web applications, or for third parties to develop custom solutions using the provider's SMS API.

The SMS systems open up a wealth of possibilities for churches to manage their communications, segmenting their membership lists so that individuals receive only the information which is relevant to their involvement with the church. Even for a large church, a web or email based communication system can be managed by a church administrator or member without any specialist technical knowledge.

One common concern is that members who don't use mobile phones will be left out if SMS communication is introduced. However, there are Voice SMS systems which allow a text message sent to a landline to be converted into a spoken message which is played to the recipient. This ensures that older or less technologically advanced church members need not be disenfranchised by a move to SMS messaging.

Some popular uses to which churches have put SMS communications include programme and activity reminders, event rescheduling or cancellation and community announcements.

SMS is a remarkably cost effective way for a church to communicate with its members and provides an immediacy that is lacking in email or postal communications. By including Voice SMS as an option, SMS really can reach the entire church community and promote a feeling of involvement and inclusivity in its members.

by: Lisa Hall

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