Your Church Content Is Failing the Lost: Why Bulletin Board Christianity Isn’t Enough

The Critical Disconnect in Your Communication Strategy

Most churches we work with are stuck in a dangerous content rut. They’re churning out material that speaks exclusively to their existing church community—the classic bulletin board information. Service times. Baptism schedules. Small group sign-ups. Important? Sure. Effective at reaching the lost? Absolutely not.

Here’s the brutal truth: This approach to church content completely alienates the very people you’re commanded to reach. The lost don’t have ears to hear your insider church language. They have zero interest in the inner workings of your congregation. While you’re announcing next month’s potluck, they’re drowning in addiction, marriage failure, and financial calamity.

Here’s the painful Say-Do Gap many churches are experiencing: You say you want to reach the lost in your community, but you’re doing nothing to address the real-life challenges and issues they face. Your content betrays your true priorities—maintaining the institution rather than advancing the Kingdom. Which is why we’ve been working with churches to develop a more strategic approach to content—one that speaks to the right audience at the right time, delivering messages that actually break through the noise and transform lives.

The solution isn’t complicated, but it does require intention: Utilize a content creation approach that allows your church to produce material that genuinely resonates with each recipient, whether they’ve walked with Jesus for decades or have never set foot in a church.

When this Say-Do Gap closes, the impact is transformative: You deepen trust, increase engagement, and build authentic relationships with both the found and the lost. Your content becomes a bridge rather than a barrier.

Here’s the key takeaway you cannot afford to miss: Your church must produce audience-specific content that is relevant to each person by providing them with hope and help for their actual struggles. Generic announcements and spiritual platitudes aren’t just ineffective—they’re a dereliction of your calling.

“How good is a timely word!”

— Proverbs 15:23b

Breaking the Church Content Crisis

Let’s be honest about why churches don’t create effective content: You don’t know what to write about. You don’t have time. You think you can’t afford it. These aren’t just challenges—they’re excuses. With today’s tools and the techniques we’re about to share, it’s time to overcome your content creation paralysis.

Churches have mastered the art of producing standard “insider” content:

• Sunday sermon messages – You’re good at delivering them, but terrible at leveraging them beyond Sunday morning. That 40-minute message contains enough spiritual nutrition to feed your people all week long, yet you’re letting it die on Sunday afternoon.
• Events and programs – You create content around these, but they’re typically superficial and focused on logistics rather than transformation.

What’s glaringly absent is content that addresses the urgent challenges your community is actually facing:

• A young married man drowning in debt needs Biblical principles of financial stewardship, not another announcement about the church picnic.
• A college-aged girl facing an unplanned pregnancy needs a guide to understand her options, not your building fund update.
• A recent widower needs hope in his grief and answers to why God allows suffering, not your clever sermon series title.

To quickly produce relevant content that actually matters, your church needs four critical components:

1. A Comprehensive Church Resource Doc – A central source of information about your church’s beliefs, values, and ministry approach.
2. Verbal Brand Guidelines – Clear documentation of your church’s voice, tone, and editorial standards that ensure all content sounds consistently like you.
3. Content Creation Circle – A framework defining your specific audience, their unique pain points, solutions to their challenges, and expected outcomes.
4. Content Pillars – The three primary topics your content will focus on, based on your church’s strengths and your community’s needs.

With these elements in place, even the most resource-strapped church can produce content that reaches beyond the sanctuary walls.

The Cornerstone-Cobblestone Content Strategy

If you want to get a deer to eat from your hand, you don’t start by charging into the forest. You place food in the field where the deer feels safe, then gradually move it closer each day until eventually, the deer comes to you.

The same principle applies to reaching the lost. You don’t start by asking them to commit their lives to Jesus. You meet them in their pain with relevant, helpful content that earns their trust.

This is where the Cornerstone-Cobblestone approach transforms your content strategy.

The Cornerstone is your substantial, authoritative resource on a topic—the foundation of your content campaign. Just as Jesus is the Cornerstone of our faith, this piece anchors everything else within a content campaign. It’s comprehensive (typically a 5-16 page PDF or an in-depth video message), addresses a specific pain point with biblical solutions, and delivers genuine hope and help.

From this Cornerstone, you extract multiple Cobblestone pieces—smaller content nuggets that explore specific aspects of the larger topic. These become blog posts that make your content accessible across multiple platforms and attention spans.

Here’s how to implement this strategy:

1. Choose one audience to focus on. Let’s say “Parents.”
2. Identify four critical challenges this audience faces. These become your quarterly campaigns for the year.
3. Develop a Cornerstone piece for your first campaign topic. Using the A+B=C formula (Pain Point + Solution = Outcome), create a substantial resource that offers genuine help. Use AI tools like ChatGPT to draft content efficiently, then refine it for your voice.
4. Extract three key points from your Cornerstone to create Cobblestone pieces. These become blog posts that point back to your Cornerstone resource.
5. Repeat for each quarterly campaign and each audience segment.

This approach transforms your content from scattershot announcements to strategic ministry assets that actually address real needs in your community.

Deploying Your Content for Maximum Impact

Creating great content means nothing if people never encounter it. Your distribution strategy is just as important as your creation process.

First, establish a proper digital foundation:

• Your church website should have dedicated sections for messages, resources, and blogs
• Each audience group should have its own landing page with relevant resources
• Cornerstone resources should live on dedicated landing pages that can be shared via email, social media, and advertising
• Blog posts should be categorized by audience and accessible from multiple entry points

Then, implement strategic nurture sequences:

• Send at least one email per week to each audience group sharing your Sunday message
• Develop campaign-based nurture sequences that deliver Cobblestone content leading to your Cornerstone resources
• Use segmented email lists to ensure content reaches the people who need it most

For churches serious about reaching the lost, supplement your organic strategy with targeted digital advertising. Yes, this requires investment, but what’s the value of a soul? Promoting your most relevant Cornerstone resources to specific audience segments in your community might be the most evangelistically effective dollars you spend all year.

Remember: The goal isn’t just to create content—it’s to create pathways that lead people from their point of pain to the hope found in Jesus Christ.

From Bulletin Board to Life Transformation

Your church content should be doing far more than announcing potlucks and listing service times. It should be addressing the divorce crisis in your community. The addiction epidemic. The financial anxiety. The parenting struggles. The crisis of meaning.

Each piece of content you create is either building bridges to the lost or reinforcing walls around the found. Which are you producing?

Take a hard look at your current content strategy: How many resources does your church have available to provide hope and help to those struggling with addictions? With mental health challenges? With marriage problems? With parenting difficulties?

If your answer is “not enough,” it’s time to reorient your approach.

Churches that implement strategic content creation see remarkable results. They connect with people who would never respond to a church invitation. They address real needs that build authentic trust. They create pathways for the curious to become the convinced.

The words you share matter. What you choose to talk about—and what you choose to ignore—speaks volumes about what you truly value.

In a world drowning in content but starving for truth, your church has an unprecedented opportunity to deliver “timely words” that cut through the noise and transform lives.

Will you continue with bulletin board Christianity, or will you create content that actually reaches the lost?

YOUR NEW COMMS PLAN

Learn how your church can apply an approach that businesses have used to successfully acquire new customers and retain existing customers. Use the power of audience segmentation to deliver personalized messages that are relevant to each person within you external and internal church community.

download