This article was last checked in June 2026. Messaging and privacy rules change, and a Privacy Act reform that could bring small churches into scope is still being worked through. Check the current position with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner before you rely on it.
Every church runs on announcements. Service times, a working bee, a roster reminder, the news that someone is unwell. In a small church that job usually falls to one person, often the same person who builds the slides and keeps the email list. This article is about doing it well, and about the quiet question sitting underneath it: do you need permission before you email or text your congregation? It is not a slides or template resource, and not a full privacy guide.
Keep announcements to a few, and point to one place
The most common mistake is volume. When everything is announced, nothing is heard. A congregation tunes out a long run of notices the same way anyone would.
A good rule is three to five spoken notices in a service, each kept short, and only the items that matter to most of the people in the room. Everything else can live in one place the whole church knows to check, whether that is a page on your website, the weekly email, or your church app. The discipline is not "tell people more." It is "tell people less in the service, and point them to one home for the rest."
For the things that really matter, a change to service times, a building project, a major event, no single channel reaches everyone. Some members never open email. Others never see the printed sheet. So the important messages need to travel more than one way: a word in the service, a slide, an email or text, and the website, with enough lead time for each to do its work.
One thing is easy to forget. Not everyone can hear a spoken notice or read a screen from the back. Caption your video announcements, offer a large-print or plain-language version of the week's information, and never rely on a verbal notice alone for members who are Deaf or hard of hearing.
Do you need permission to email or text your church?
Start with the standard, not the legal minimum. Ask people before you add them to a list, tell them what they will receive, make it easy to leave, and sign every message clearly so they know who it is from. That is how anyone would want their own inbox treated, and it is the direction privacy law is moving, in Australia and overseas.
The strict legal position asks less of you. The Spam Act 2003 covers commercial electronic messages, the kind that offer, advertise, or promote something for sale. Service times, rosters, working bees, prayer requests, and pastoral news are not that, so the Act's consent and unsubscribe rules do not apply to them. The rules come into play when a message genuinely promotes something commercial: tickets to a gala dinner, a paid course or retreat, a product in the church shop, or a third party's goods. A message like that must also accurately identify who sent it. Even then, a church registered as a charity has a partial exemption when promoting its own activities, though the identification requirement still applies. The grey area is regular fundraising, which can fall either side of the line depending on how it is worded, and is worth specific advice if you do a lot of it.
Treat that gap between the law and the standard as room to be generous, not permission to do less. A member who was asked, and who knows how to leave the list, trusts every message that follows. Build the habit while it is easy, and the law can tighten around you without changing anything you do.
Look after the list
The bigger responsibility is not the sending. It is the list itself. A list of members reveals their religious affiliation, so a congregation's contact details count as sensitive information under Australian privacy law.
Most churches with a turnover under $3 million are not strictly bound by the Privacy Act today. But the standard it describes is the same one the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) expects of any charity, and it is not hard to meet. Tell people why you are collecting their details. Use those details only for what you said. Keep them somewhere secure. And never share or sell the list, even to another church, without asking first. A members' list is a trust, not an asset.
This is also not guaranteed to stay optional. A reform that would remove the small-business exemption and bring many small churches under the Privacy Act has been flagged, though not yet passed. A church that already treats member details with care will have nothing to retrofit.
If you do move into genuinely promotional or fundraising messaging, check the current rules with ACMA. And for handling member information well, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's not-for-profit guidance is the place to start.