How to make a church bulletin that is ready by Thursday
A weekly bulletin is a small job that happens fifty-two times a year, and that is why it wears people down. The first one is easy. By the thirtieth you are hunting for last week's file, changing four dates, and wondering whether the sunset time is right.
This is the routine that works for most churches, with the points where it usually goes wrong.
Start with the schedule, not the bulletin
Almost everything in a bulletin is already decided somewhere else: who is speaking, who is on the platform, who is playing, which offering is being received, what the children's story is. If those answers live in a schedule for the quarter, the bulletin is just a view of it. If they live in people's heads and text messages, you will chase them every Wednesday.
So the first step is a single place where the roster is written down once. A spreadsheet is fine. What matters is that nobody is typing the speaker's name into three different documents.
Collect the pieces that change
Each week there are a handful of things that are new. Make a short list and ask for them on the same day each week, by the same method, from the same people.
- The hymns, with numbers and titles, and the scripture reading.
- The sermon title, if the speaker uses one.
- Announcements, each with a date, a place and a name to contact.
- The prayer requests that can be printed.
- The Sabbath School lesson title and memory verse for that week.
Pick a deadline and keep to it. Thursday noon works for most churches because it leaves Friday for proofreading and printing. If something arrives late, it goes in next week's bulletin or gets announced from the front, and people learn quickly that the deadline is real.
Things that come from the calendar
Some items do not need to be asked for at all. The Friday and Saturday sunset times follow from your location and the date. The Sabbath School lesson follows from the quarterly. The offering of the week follows from the calendar your conference or union publishes. Looking these up by hand every week is where small mistakes creep in, such as last month's sunset time or the wrong offering. Our guides on sunset times and offering calendars explain where the numbers come from.
Lay it out once, then leave it alone
Decide the layout once and reuse it. People find things faster when the order of service is always on the same page, and a volunteer who steps in for a month can follow what you did. A few choices are worth settling early:
- Page size. Most churches use one letter or A4 sheet folded in half. There is more in our guide to size and folding.
- What goes where. Cover on the front, order of service inside, announcements across from it, giving and prayer on the back is a common pattern.
- Fonts. One typeface for headings and one for text is plenty. Body text under 11 point is hard for many readers.
Proofread with one other person
The person who built the bulletin is the worst person to proofread it, because they see what they meant. Hand it to someone else for five minutes. Ask them to check three things: names spelled correctly, times and dates right, hymn numbers matching the titles. Hymn numbers are the usual slip.
Print, fold, and keep a record
Print a test copy before you run the full set. Two-sided printing and folding can go wrong in small ways, such as pages in the wrong order or a margin that gets trimmed. Save the final version as a PDF with the date in the file name. When someone asks in March what the announcement was in January, you will be able to find it.
Where the time goes
If the bulletin takes you an evening, count the minutes. Most of it is rarely writing. It is copying a speaker's name from one place to another, changing dates, finding a hymn title, and fixing the spacing after something got longer. Those are the parts a tool can do, and they are the parts that make the job feel bigger than it is. The writing, the choosing and the proofreading are the parts worth your time.
That is what Bulletin Generator is built for. You keep the roster in a schedule, you type the few things that change, and the bulletin, the PDF and the web link come out the other end. If you would like to see how it works with your own church, you can ask to try it.
Common questions
How long should a church bulletin take to make?
A bulletin built by hand in a word processor usually takes an evening, because most of the time goes on retyping names, times and hymn titles. A routine where the schedule is filled in once and the bulletin is built from it can come down to a short check.
Should a church bulletin be one sheet or a booklet?
One sheet folded in half gives four pages, which is enough for most churches. A booklet only makes sense when you regularly have more than four pages of real content.