Last week we kicked off Creating a Welcome Video for Your Church Website – Part 1 by looking at the benefits of creating a welcome video for your church and putting it on your church website. Then we looked at 4 church welcome videos for ideas and observations.
My church created a welcome video a while back and my hope is I can share some of what I learned and you can share what you learn as you go through the process. If you missed the first post, you have plenty of time to read it and catch up.
In part 2, we’re going to focus on what may be the most difficult part of creating a church welcome video – writing the script.
I say this because in one of my church’s elders meeting, we tried to do this and found it very challenging. How do you describe your church in just a minute or two?
8 Tips for Writing a Church Welcome Video Script
1) A script is absolutely essential. You don’t want anyone – not even your lead pastor – ad-libbing your welcome video. The video has to be succinct and on point and that means writing out what is going to be said word for word.
2) Brainstorm together. Get the leadership team together and discuss “Who is [our church]? Write everything down. Don’t edit yet. The end result will be way more than could be described in a couple minutes, but that’s ok.
3) Discuss structure. How do you want to open the video – with your mission statement? scripture? a personal introduction? How do you want it to flow? How do you want to close? What specific action step do you want to invite the viewer to take? Here’s where watching some other church welcome videos together can really help.
4) Whittle. Once the brainstorming is done and you have a general idea of the structure, look at your brainstorming notes and work together to decide what to cut. What absolutely must be said about your church? Focus on what makes your church unique and what people need to know so they’ll feel comfortable participating in a worship service.
5) Have one or two people write a script. At this point in our meeting we started kicking around specific language… and got nowhere. We just couldn’t do it in a group setting. Maybe your leadership team consists of more gifted collaborators, but we decided to have two of us write proposed scripts on our own outside of the meeting.
6) Edit, feedback, edit. If you do have more than one script written, you’re going to have to choose one. But take the time to get feedback from the whole leadership team and make improvements. Read it out loud. Make sure you time it so you know it’s not too long.
7) Finalize the script. The last thing you want is to show your church leaders the video and have them say, “That’s really good but how about if we say this instead.” Make sure the lead pastor and elders not only “approve” the script but agree not to request any more changes before you start recording.
If you’re the lead pastor of your church and you’re thinking, “Man, that sounds like a really long, complicated process. It would be a lot easier just to write the script yourself.” Well, you’re right, it would be easier I think you’ll end up with a much better video and much buy-in from your congregation with collaboration, but we’re all experimenting here.
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. -Helen Keller
Here are some suggested action steps…
Action Steps
- Write your church welcome video script.
- Post a comment and tell us how it went.
- If you’ve created a church welcome video in the past, share your thoughts and advice on the process for writing the script.
Read more articles on how to use video to advance your mission.
I appreciate that one of the first things you said for making a church welcome video is to just write down every idea and not edit it. Seems like it could be very beneficial to just get any idea you may have down, and look back at it later. Maybe something you hadn’t really considered before could seem very appealing the next day or so.