Could we abandon church notices?

How are your notices? Highlight of the service, or a necessity that is dull as ditch-water?

For most of us, they’re probably too long and just a bit awkward. Like an Aunt who’s come for Christmas but, love her as you do, you don’t quite know what to do with her, and everyone can all relax once she’s gone home. So, can the notices be improved? Or moved? Or removed?

How ruthless is your pruning?

Here are some quetsions to ask yourself:

1. Are they too long? And if so, how ruthless is your pruning? I know a church which just has three notices. That’s the limit. Well, why not?
2. Who delivers them? Does the same person do them week in week out? Maybe you think it’s the role of the senior minister to give the notices, but maybe you don't always have to do it that way. How about trying another voice or, why not have two people giving the notices, especially if they can ‘bounce’ off one another?
3. Do you prepare them well? How much time do you give to preparing what you’ll say and how you’ll deliver the verbal notices (if you have them)? Would you give that little attention to anything else happening in the service?
4. How are they delivered? Have you ever told a story which encapsulated all the notices? Or made up a poem which did the same thing? Or a song? OK, maybe not.
5. Where are they in your service? Let’s face it there’s no good place to have them in the service. If there were, we’d all be doing it. If you have them in the middle, you kill the flow of the service and if you have them at the end, people have less chance of remembering that great sermon. At the start? Well, what about the perennial late-comers? You could of course, move them to a notice sheet.
6. Where else are they? If they are on a notice sheet, make sure it’s different to last week’s: different colour, different content, different design. Yes it’s hard work, but if you want people to read them, you have to overcome the barrier of people thinking that they read them the week before. Or you could move them to the ‘adverts’ on the screen, but who actually reads them? Newcomers might, but for the rest of us, it’s disconcertingly like wallpaper.

Improve them, move them, and the unthinkable: Remove them. What would happen if you didn’t have any notices in the service? Would your church collapse? Yes, of course, people do need to know what’s happening, but if people don’t listen, using the notices to check their social media, then what would you lose? You could try it for a month, see what happens, and then have a little think tank to work on improving them and making them… fun!