Church newsletter ideas, templates, and how to send one to a congregation

What is the difference between a bulletin and a newsletter?#

A bulletin is a schedule. Order of service, who reads, which hymns, the meetings in the building that week. It is useful for about eight days and then it is waste paper. A newsletter is a story with a date on it: what the congregation did, who is joining, who needs prayer, what is coming next month.

They need different emails because they need different rhythms. A bulletin is a promise about a time. If it lands at 9pm on Saturday it has missed its whole purpose. A newsletter can arrive on any day and still be read, and its value is that people come to expect it.

Pick one email and mean it. Sending the bulletin in a newsletter shape buries the service times under a story nobody was looking for, and sending the newsletter in a bulletin shape gives people a schedule and no reason to keep the address.

What should a church newsletter include?#

Open with one thing. Not a greeting, not a verse, not a paragraph about the weather in the building works. Open with the single item you would mention if you saw the reader at the door on Sunday.

• The one thing, written first and in plain sentences.
• Dates with day names on them, because people check a phone diary by the weekday.
• Who is doing it. A named volunteer reads as an invitation; a committee reads as a notice.
• The serving and the ask: refreshments, lifts, money, prayer, a shift on a stall.
• Prayer list, with the option to send a request privately rather than in a reply-all.
• New faces: births, arrivals, weddings, members who have died. This is the part people read.
• Children and youth news, sent to parents who are older than the readership average.
• Giving, once, as a link in text rather than a picture of a button.
• Times and place, repeated at the bottom for whoever scrolled past it.
• A real postal address for the church and a working unsubscribe link.

How long should a church newsletter be?#

Four hundred to seven hundred words, and one screen of that is the story. Notices can be a list under it, because nobody reads a notice as prose anyway.

There is no published benchmark for a congregation, and I am not going to invent one. The honest test is your own: send it at the length you think is right, then look at how many people clicked anything at all. If the number is small, cut a third and send again. If it moves, you had a length problem, not a congregation problem.

How do I write a church newsletter article?#

Three paragraphs, in this order. What happened, told through a person rather than a programme. What it took, which is the part that makes people feel included instead of addressed. What the reader can do next, with a date and a way to say yes.

Write it as it would be said out loud at the close of the service. If you would not say the phrase to a person standing in the porch, do not put it in the email. The gap between church writing and church speaking is where most of the padding comes from, and readers feel it before they can name it.

One more rule worth keeping: put the facts in the text. Dates, times, names and costs written inside an image are invisible when a mail app blocks pictures, and invisible to the filter deciding whether the message looks like mail or like junk.

What are good church newsletter article ideas?#

• The person who did the thing nobody else would do, in 150 words.
• What the building fund has bought so far, with receipts.
• A recipe from the harvest supper, credited to whoever brought it.
• One line of explanation for a word the visitors misunderstand, such as vestry or canon.
• The flowers on the altar and whose family they are for.
• A photograph of the children at something, with the parents asked first.
• What the small group is doing this term and how to join it mid-way.
• The bell tower, the roof, the heating: one maintenance story, honestly costed.
• An ordinary answer to an ordinary question about belief, no sermon attached.
• A column from someone who joined last year, about what surprised them.
• The notice board, photographed and captioned, for the members who never come in.
• Who is away, and how to write to them.

Should I email the weekly bulletin?#

Only if you will send it at the same moment every week and never skip. A bulletin email trains people to open it at a time, which is a real asset and a real debt. Miss two Sundays and the habit goes, and the unsubscribes arrive a month later, long after the cause.

If one volunteer can only manage once a month, then send a monthly newsletter and put the week's times in the footer. A monthly email people open beats a weekly email nobody expects.

How do I get my congregation onto an email list?#

Start with the people who already come and ask them directly, because the hard part of a church list is not size, it is the members who moved away and never said so.

1. Put a sign-up sheet at the back with a name, an address, and one line saying what will arrive and how often.
2. Print a link and a QR code on the order of service so a visitor can join on the way out.
3. Put the sign-up form on the church website, on the home page rather than buried under What We Believe.
4. Every month, name the list out loud in the notices, since half of the regulars are not on it.
5. Let people add a family member, and accept that one address often means a couple sharing a phone.
6. Ask the choir, the circle and the weekday group leads to collect addresses for their own groups.

Do not build the list out of the electoral roll, the funeral book or last year's holiday club. Those are people who gave an address for a different reason, and mailing them turns a warm congregation into a cold complaint rate. What consent requires and how to collect it on a form are on their own pages.

What goes wrong with a free Word church template?#

Two things, and neither is the template's fault. First, a Word file is laid out for paper: two columns, a fixed page, a printer at the end. A phone is a window that changes width, blocks the pictures, and substitutes its own fonts, so the masthead that sat on one line now sits on three.

Second, a template downloaded for Word carries its pictures as references to files on your machine. They display for you and nowhere else. Mailing that file means every reader sees an empty box where the rose window was.

The fix is not a better template. It is moving the words into a design built for mail, with the photographs uploaded somewhere public so they have an address of their own. How to make a newsletter in Word walks through the same problem from the mail-merge side, including what a merge cannot attach or copy.

How do I add the giving link without turning every email into an appeal?#

One ask per email, and the ask in the same place every time so people learn where it is. A link in text, with the amount or the purpose next to it, beats a banner image that says SUPPORT US and costs a download.

If the church already has a giving page, use it. Nothing here needs to replace the system your treasurer uses, and a newsletter tool that cannot link out to where the money is already taken is the wrong tool.

Do the anti-spam rules apply to a church?#

That is a legal question, and this page is not a lawyer. What can be said plainly: the US CAN-SPAM rules are written about commercial messages, and a weekly note about a bake sale is not obviously one of those. The rules our own checklist works through are worth reading anyway, because two of them are the ones that decide whether a congregation stays on your list or reports you: the CAN-SPAM checklist for a small sender.

A working unsubscribe, a real postal address, honest subject lines. None of that costs a church anything, and all of it is the courtesy of telling people how to stop being told.

How do I make the newsletter readable for older members?#

• Body text at 16 pixels or larger, and no smaller type for the notices.
• One column. Two columns on a narrow screen means the reader swipes sideways through a sentence.
• Dark text on a light background. Cream on white photographs well and reads badly.
• Every link separated from its neighbour by a line of space, since a fingertip is not a mouse.
• Nothing written inside an image, including the dates.
• A telephone number in the footer, for the members who will ring rather than click.
• Plain language, because a phrase like our ministries have been enriched means nothing at 78.

Can more than one person work on the newsletter?#

Decide this before the second month, because it is the reason church emails drift. A sending account has one login, and the person holding it is the sender as far as the congregation is concerned. The writing can rotate all you like: the person whose month it is drafts in whatever they think in, and whoever holds the login pastes the words in and presses send.

Put the schedule on paper for the year. Six names, six months, one reminder sent to next month's writer while this month's is still working.

What should the subject line of a church email say?#

The church name, then what it is, then the date. Front-load, because a phone shows the first few words and cuts the rest.

What happens when someone leaves?#

They move, they die, or they stop liking being emailed, and all three show up as an address that will not take mail or a button pressed in irritation. The address list should be a mirror of the people who come, not a record of everyone who ever signed a sheet.

This is why the unsubscribe link has to work. An address that cannot leave comes back as a complaint, and a complaint rate is one of the few things that gets a whole domain treated as suspect. The good news is that the bounced ones are already visible: a bounce is a letter from the other server telling you the person has gone.

Should the church send from a personal Gmail?#

It will not do the job, and not for any reason to do with holiness. A free mailbox has a ceiling on how many addresses one message may carry, and it counts your congregation against a limit written for a person writing to colleagues. Push past it and the mailbox is the thing that gets restricted, with the church's only contact address locked inside it.

Use a church role address rather than a person's name, so the next vicar inherits it. Sending to a large group in Gmail or Outlook has the numbers and the workarounds.

Common questions