- Channel topics
- Finding faithHow people become Christians
- Effective communicationApproaches for biblical communication
- Bridge the gapMeeting people on the common ground of their interests & needs
- Bridging opportunitiesExamples and opportunities for using the Bridge Strategy
- Using cultureTypes of culture; understanding & using culture in evangelism
- Websites that workIssues for site planning, usability and promotion
- Problems in evangelismThings that stop us being effective
- Mission opportunitiesDigital evangelism & cross-cultural mission, mission & literature resources
- Writing wellHow to write effectively for the web or print media
A Communication Channel page
... our resource covering a wide range of evangelism issues
View entire listing here or use left-hand subject menu.Free: articles are freely available to republish or adapt for print media, and can be syndicated into websites using a simple insert code.
Contact cards – a great way to share faith
Contact cards (ie. invitation cards in business card format) are a good way to share your faith, and have some advantages over tracts:
- Small – so you can easily carry a supply at all times (small metal containers for purse, wallet or pocket are widely available).
- Culturally acceptable almost anywhere, whereas tracts can be seen as threatening and religious in some circumstances.
- Can be personalized with your name, email address and your website URL.
- If you don’t have a site of your own, you can use cards which feature any evangelistic site that you feel is appropriate.
- Ideal as invitations to local churches.
There are companies offering double-sided printing of cards incredibly cheaply – less than ten dollars/euros/pounds for 250 cards, such as VistaPrint which has offices in 20 countries. Check online for others. See our tips for designing cards, which apply both to Vistaprint, other online providers, or DIY production.
Evangelistic sites
Evangelistic sites can offer online a read-to-print contact card that Christians can use. 10 or 15 cards
could be offered in full-color as a PDF file, for easy printing onto thin card.
Alternatively, outreach sites can offer ready-made
contact cards on their websites, to be shipped by post. To the right is an example of a printed
card produced by French outreach site Connaitre Dieu. Outreach team TruthMedia.com
offers a range of downloadable and printable
contact cards
covering a number of their outreach sites.
You can also make up your own personal address card which includes recommended URLs for outreach sites you feel are appropriate.
There may be opportunities to think outside the box. Some churches distribute beer mats with their name, URL and contact information. Here are some very creative ideas for contact cards. T-shirts and car-stickers with a prominent site URL are another way of helping Christians to do ‘viral marketing’ for an outreach site. A T-shirt can alternatively carry a mobile phone Short Code number, as a way of getting information delivered to someone’s mobile phone by text message.
Church contact cards
Churches can print contact cards in bulk for their members to use, with a link to the church website. Ideally, the church site should be very outsider friendly.
Church & Ministry Business Cards
is a highly-recommended guide to writing and printing contact cards. This is one of a range of
e-books in PDF format by Yvon Prehn – others are available on church communications, Mother’s Day and Halloween outreaches,
and more.
In Business Cards that Church members can give away, evangelism coach Rev Chris Walker highlights the value of contact cards for churches.
The term contact card is sometimes applied to cards that first-time church visitors can enter their address and other information. For more on this quite separate issue, see:
- Connection cards – an e-book by Yvon Prehn
- Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of your Church – book by Nelson Searcey
- Other church hospitality books – reviews by evangelism coach Chris Walker. He also offers a free 5-day email course Avoid First Time Visitor Nightmares!.
An appeal for tract publishers
It would be good to see more Christian literature publishers using the contact card format. A surprising amount of information can be included if the card is double-sided. 4-color printing coupled to quality graphic design can make a very exciting product at a low unit cost. The following features can be included in such a card:- a challenge to think
- answers to the problems of life
- one or two quotes or mini-testimonies from named individuals, which helps people identify with the feelings expressed
- the Gospel in a nutshell
- name and email address or other contact details
- one or more websites which present the Gospel clearly to someone who has no Christian knowledge
One Christian ministry, Vitanovis, is planning a general presentation of the Gospel, and allows Christians to post their testimonies on the site using a webpage interface. They can then use a contact card on which they write the ‘jump-code’ URL for their own testimony.
Offering CDs
Because DVDs and CDs are so cheap to copy, they are also a wonderful tool to distribute free. Small credit-card sized CDs have however fallen out of favor, as they tend to get stuck in some CD drives. Churches can distribute introductory DVDs in their neigborhood.
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 related pages within the Websites that work menu linksrecommended books on church ministry, including free downloads valuable online videos about web ministry
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