Often the roles of a church communication director, whether paid or volunteer, are discussed when communication goes wrong or the congregation isn’t aware of what’s going on. It becomes even more important when your community is ignoring ministry activity that should interest them. 

If the budget allows, it’s certainly worth hiring a part-time or full-time communication director to tackle this challenging job. Times have changed, with increased channels, tools and noise that need to be addressed with professionally-crafted messaging that works well with systems. Most average-sized churches can easily keep someone busy with the needed work.

Don’t have a budget? Then you can search within your congregation for someone willing to help. But honestly, the amount of work, standards and requirements demands a lot of a volunteer. However, if well executed and with the proper oversight, the foundational roles of the communication director can be fulfilled by a volunteer.

Here are the three roles of the church communication director that encompass most day-to-day tasks.

1. Support 

The communication director is a support role that has the ability to lead. He or she  ultimately supports the church leadership with an expertise in crafting and fine-tuning content while being allowed to lead their communication area. These professionals need to make decisions on the fly while representing individual pastors and advocating for audiences, mainly the community and congregations. The perfect candidate for this role exhibits true servant leadership.

2. Empower

Of the three roles of the communication director, this one is critical. This often thankless job can be all-consuming because of the many components: sermon slides, content for social media channels (that’s demanding 24/7), an ever-changing website with SEO (search engine optimization) standards, print materials (bulletin, stationery, banners, etc.) needing to be kept up-to-date and relevant content written, designed and edited. Then he must regularly meet with pastors and ministry leaders to retrieve information, clarify changes and follow up after events. Whew! That’s a lot. It’s difficult to do it all alone. That’s why, with a ministry heart, he needs to empower others to get it all done—from gently educating leaders how to supply content to helping a volunteer social media team with posts.

3. Enable

There are risks when you have a communication director. Doing a job well means limiting voices and promotion. Everyone can’t have a loud voice, or it contributes to our already noisy information environment, which causes people to ignore the content. On the road to forming messaging to meet SEO and branding standards, he can easily become the “Pastor of No.” But in the proper servant leader role of the communication director, your director MUST enable ministries to do effective work and not restrict it. That doesn’t mean he gives in to unreasonable demands; instead, he needs to use his leadership to do his job well while educating on better ways. Be sure to hire a positive person with a “can-do” attitude!

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Mark MacDonald is a communication pastor, speaker, consultant, bestselling author and church branding strategist for BeKnownforSomething.com and executive director of Center for Church Communication, empowering 10,000+ churches to become known for something relevant (a communication thread) throughout their ministries, websites, & social media. His book, Be Known for Something, is available at BeKnownBook.com.)