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Writing for a diocesan audience

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Anyone who writes articles for church publications or local media understands the difference between writing for an internal audience (your congregation) and an external one (your community). But have you thought about the issues when writing for another type of audience – your fellow churches in the Diocese of Newark?

Previously, I've blogged about the basics of writing a feature article and how that differs from writing a news story, as well as issues to consider when writing for the web. Today I'll talk about how to write about your church’s ministries for diocesan publication in a way that will capture your fellow churches’ attention – and leap to the head of the publication queue.

Often churches submit feature articles to me for possible publication on the diocesan website and The VOICE Online that describe a laudable ministry or cover a successful event. That’s wonderful – I love to publish stories about the terrific things our congregations are doing. The problem comes if the scope of the article is the same as it would be if the audience is limited to the church’s community.

When the audience is your church’s community, it can be enough simply to communicate that “Great things are happening here at St. Swithin’s.” You want your community to view your church as a place where spiritual sustenance can be found and important work is being done.

Your fellow churches, on the other hand, want to hear more than just that great things are happening at your church. They already have their own great things happening – their own forms of spiritual sustenance and their own important work.

What will really capture their attention is if your article delves into the why and how of your laudable ministry or your successful event – the discernment process, the challenges, the experiments, the failures, the learnings.

An article written for a diocesan audience will be more interesting to your fellow churches – and frankly, more useful – if it addresses, thoughtfully, questions such as these:

How did you discern that this is what your church should be doing? What did you see God doing in your neighborhood? What made you decide to join God there?

What steps did you take to join in God’s work?

What challenges did you encounter? Did you overcome them? How? If not, what did you do then?

Did you decide to attempt something as an experiment knowing full well that it might not work? What happened?

What did you learn from all this?

All congregations wrestle with questions like these. If your article can “open the curtain” on how your congregation navigated them, then it will be an article that is much more likely to be published, read, discussed and remembered.

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