Acts 15: 22-29: Dissecting the Apostles' Communications Strategy
Aug 02, 2022
In this blog series, I’m going to take a look at the book of Acts from a strategic point of view. What was going on in the days of the early church and what can we learn from it today in the 21st Century?
In Acts 15, the decision at the Council of Jerusalem is made, with James taking the role of chairman. James’s decision is that Gentiles should abstain from things polluted by idols, sexually immorality and blood.
Once a decision is made, you’re only halfway there. Most churches have less of a problem with decision-making than they do with communicating decision with their congregation.
The problem is that often traditional waterfall communication methods can be very slow and cumbersome, and usually results in a lot of leaks. How many times have you *heard* what’s going on before you’re told? Anytime communication must go down layer by layer, it’s going to result in leaks.
But what’s the alternative? It seems important that some people need to know decisions before others, especially leaders. How are we to overcome that? As we see in this passage, the decision team in Jerusalem were less focused on who needed to know and more focused on people understanding what they needed to know. This is the paradigm shift we need to make in communicating decisions, focusing less on who and when people need to know, and focusing more on why they need to know it.
Different Structure
To get better at communications, you need to understand that your communications structure must be different to your organisational structure. If your communications structure follows your organisational structure, you’ll get the same slow output you’re used to. Whereas, if you split the structures so that communications sits outside of it, you can communicate faster, as it doesn’t need to flow down the waterfall.
This way, you can create an almost flat communications structure where everyone hears the decision at the same time, and as we’ll see, this is what the apostles and elders appear to have done.
Barsabbas and Silas
The apostles and elders decide to send two of the group back to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. Judas Barsabbas is the first person. We met a Barsabbas earlier in the book of Acts, Joseph Barsabbas, who was the one not chosen to replace Judas Iscariot in Acts 1. Whether this indicates that they were brothers is unclear, but I’d like to think that they were. What it says to me is that Barsabbas wasn’t an unknown name. My hunch is that they would have heard of the Barsabbases. The other is Silas, and he will become a key part of the story moving forward.
The point of these two was that if Paul and Barnabas had gone back and told the news and shown the letter, many would have assumed that they lied to get their own way. However, if you send two people from Jerusalem to corroborate your story, you’ve got a much better chance of success.
A problem with communicating in a waterfall fashion is that the leader tells the team member, who tells their team, who tells their team and so on. It can produce Chinese Whispers where the message gets lost as it moves down the waterfall. The other problem is that it gets slow as the leader has to fully understand what’s being communicated for them to pass it on.
The apostles cut this by taking two people who were presumably in the room to come and explain what was said and what was agreed.
In your church, you can follow this method. Instead of relying on people who weren’t in the room to relay important information, you or a member of your team who was in the room can be present to explain what was happening when the decision was made and how that affects the people listening to the message.
Use technology
The apostles and elders turn to the technology of the day to spread the word of the decision – the letter. The letter was the best and fasted way to tell a lot of people something in the ancient world.
It’s only been in the last few decades that the letter has been superseded as the best form of communication. Today, we have much better options available than the letter to get information out fast to your congregation.
Here are the best methods you can use when you need to communicate a decision:
Email is still by far one of the most powerful tools for communicating decisions. Your church’s database most likely has many more people on it than attendees at your weekend gatherings, so you’ve got a much better chance of reaching the most amount of people. Here’s the problem. The open rate on emails is about 21.5%. That means that if you have 1,000 people on your church database, it’s only going to be opened by 215 people. That’s a good start, but you’re going to need more.
- Social Media
Social Media is a great tool that can help you quickly communicate with people. Most people are on at least one Social Media platform. Many people are on more than one platform multiple times per day, which means that you’ve got a better chance of your communication being read or heard. What makes it even better is that Social Media is designed to be Social, that means that you can do the job of Judas Barsabbas and Silas from your house, answering questions and being on hand to give further explanation. The big problem with social media is that online behaviour is very different from face-to-face behaviour. We’ve all heard of Twitter mobs, so you need to be really careful what you post about, as your decision will be seen by more than just your congregation.
- Instant Messaging Systems
Instant Messaging systems are things like Slack, Teams or WhatsApp. They’re great for staff-level communication, as you can get the word out really quickly without having the clunkiness of email. The problem is that you’ve got to have everyone on the same platform for it to work, and that is almost impossible. Even if most people are on WhatsApp, if your church is beyond 50 people, you will struggle to get that many people on to one channel to communicate with them.
- Church Announcements
I had to put this in, because as someone who creates the Sunday Programmes at my church, I get inundated with requests for announcements. Here’s the problem with church announcements. Firstly, not everyone who calls your church their church is attending each week. Attendance is usually somewhere between once to twice a month, that means that people have only got a 1 in 4 chance of hearing it, which puts it in the same territory as email. Secondly, most people switch off during announcements. This makes it even less effective. I’ve actually banned all announcements at church now, except for vision-based announcements. If people are going to listen to an announcement, I want It to not be information, but vision.
A Combined Strategy
As none of these means reach everybody all at once, you’ll need to create a combined strategy that can cover as many people as possible very quickly. If you get this right, you can make an announcement as a church and reach people very quickly. I’d recommend a mixture of some or all of these things depending on what it is, but they key is follow up. The apostles and elders’ communications strategy succeeded because they sent Judas Barabbas and Silas to answer questions. When we do this, we turn stale communications into a two-way conversation. And the more people can understand the why behind a decision, the more likely they are to go along with it, even if they disagree with it.
As a church leader, focus less on who needs to know and the order in which they need to be told, and focus more about how you can get the word out quickly but with a human explanation – someone to explain why, and then for those people to be on hand to answer any questions. Get this right, and you’ll transform your church communications.
