Church emails can be a real blessing, communicating encouragement, concerns, information about the activities of the church body, service schedules and details, links to online services and classes, expectations for the future, and even teaching—a wide variety of information, the “how-to” of church life during the pandemic. Many will find that, even when the pandemic is gone, they will want to continue the practice of sending regular emails to the congregation. Still, church emails can present difficulties that sometimes irritate already-frayed relations of the church with its isolated congregants. As the curator of the Christian Quotation of the Day, a daily Christian email that has run for 25 years, I have seen many of those problems in my own email ministry, as well as those of the churches I have attended over that time.  So, let me draw on that experience and present the seven deadly sins of church emails:

Sin #1: Breaking your publication schedule—

Robert McAnally Adams is a retired mathematician and curator of The Christian Quotation of the Day. See cqod.com