I read recently that the average person in 2018 reads more in one day than our counterparts in the 1400s read in their whole life. I am not sure if that is ‘fake news’ but it did get me thinking! A lot of my day is taken up with reading different documents, e-mails or texts. Very few people actually post letters to the Brigade Secretary but each week there are hundreds of things to read.

Even the way we read books has changed. Are you a fan of a Kindle or do you still prefer to have a physical book to hold? I always preferred having a book to take with me but on recent holidays the advantages of having the equivalent of a large book on an app on my phone has become obvious, and it is so much easier if you want to read a chapter or two in a café or on a train.

We are fortunate to live in an age when it has never been so easy to communicate. Each day BB friends from across the globe keep in touch via Facebook and it is great to see what is going on across the UK and ROI too. However, sometimes it is still easy to get it wrong. How often has someone misread an e-mail and then taken offence? Making sure people always get the right message in BB circles is a challenge too. Often the content doesn’t reach the intended recipients and occasionally I hear some real nonsense when folk have got the wrong idea about some new plan. Over the past few months we have spent time reviewing our communications strategy and are trying to make the best use of the very limited resources we have.

In my role I am privileged to meet some really excellent communicators; there are some people you could just listen to all day long – including the Brigade President. How amazing it would have been to hear Our Lord delivering the Sermon on the Mount or one of his parables. Surely he would now be a real hit on YouTube! The Gospel message delivered 2,000 years ago still rings true and is still so relevant to our message today. Do think about how we communicate that message to the young people in our charge.

Bill Stevenson
Brigade Secretary & CEO

Follow Bill on Twitter at @BillBBHQ